Presented by Sammy Jay of Peter Harrington Rare Books.
Octavo. Original cream boards, spine lettered in red, pictorial block of two dancing cats to front board. With the dust jacket. Housed in a red quarter morocco solander box made by the Chelsea Bindery. With numerous colour and monochrome illustrations by Nicolas Bentley. Spine slightly toned, cloth a touch soiled, mild foxing throughout, text block strained in a couple of places but firm. A very good copy in a lightly toned and soiled jacket with slightly nicked and creased extremities and a couple of minor chips.
First illustrated edition. An excellent association copy, signed by Eliot as Old Possum and inscribed on the front free endpaper to the Tandy family (Geoffrey, Doris “Polly”, and their three children), whose second child Alison was one of the dedicatees: “To the Tandy family from O.P.” Eliot initially met Geoffrey Tandy, a writer, broadcaster and scientist who worked at the Natural History Museum, in a pub. As their friendship deepened, Eliot would frequently visited the Tandys and they also kept up a regular correspondence. Throughout the 1930s, the family would be the first audience on which Eliot tested out the cat poems, both in letters and on visits to the family’s Hampshire cottage. In addition, Geoffrey would be the first to present the cat poems to a wider public, as he read parts of Practical Cats on BBC radio on the Christmas Day of 1937, two years before the book was published.
