This month marks the 400th anniversary of one of the most important books ever published: Shakespeare’s First Folio. It has been credited with shaping and solidifying Shakespeare’s influence on the English language – the literal and literary heft of the First Folio granting Shakespeare’s works a prominent and permanent place in the English literary canon. However, at the time of the Folio’s publication, many of Shakespeare’s plays had started to fall out of fashion and were staged less frequently. The First Folio was the first book solely dedicated to printed plays ever to be published in the prestigious folio format – an imposing size usually reserved for religious texts such as Bibles and collections of sermons. This folio format lent a gravitas and importance to Shakespeare’s plays, marking them out as something far beyond mere entertainments, and in the process established the world’s most important literary canon.
‘The Play’s The Thing’
In Shakespeare’s day, plays were written to be performed, and rarely printed – and as a result many were lost. The real importance of the First Folio rests on the fact that it contains 36 plays by William Shakespeare, half of which had never been published before. Of Shakespeare’s plays, only five are missing – Pericles, Prince of Tyre, The Two Noble Kinsmen, Edward III, and the two lost plays, Cardenio and Love’s Labour’s Won. Without the First Folio, 18 of Shakespeare’s plays would have been lost forever, including some of his most loved and well-known works such as As You Like It, Twelfth Night, Macbeth, Julius Caesar and The Tempest.
The plays themselves were typeset from varying sources; many, including The Merry Wives of Windsor and Measure for Measure, were set into type from manuscripts prepared by Ralph Crane who was a professional scrivener employed by the King’s Men (the acting company in which Shakespeare belonged). Many others were taken from what are known as Shakespeare’s foul papers – working drafts of a play. When these working drafts were completed, the author or a scribe would then prepare a transcript or fair copy of the play. These copies were heavily annotated with detailed stage directions needed for a performance, and usually served as prompt books used to help guide the performance of the play.
An estimated 750 First Folios were printed in 1623; currently 233 are known to survive worldwide. More than a third of these are housed at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C., which is home to a total of 82 First Folios. On the private market they are exceedingly rare and highly sought after. One can expect a copy to fetch a price tag in the millions of pounds.
The Birth of Shakespeare’s Canon
The unpublished plays were the property of Shakespeare’s theatrical company, the King’s Men, with manuscripts in the possession of Shakespeare’s two fellow company members and friends, John Heminge and Henry Condell. They compiled the contents of the First Folio in 1623, seven years after their friend’s death, by which time most of Shakespeare’s plays had fallen out of the repertoire. Were it not for the First Folio, the scattered papers would have been worthless. With its great heft and imposing appearance, the First Folio established the Shakespearean canon for all time.
In book form, the plays found a new lease of life and sense of permanence. The First Folio was reprinted in 1632, again in 1663, and in 1685, the four Shakespeare folios spanning the century, eclipsing the rival collections of Ben Jonson and Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher, the English dramatists who collaborated in their writing during the reign of James I (1603–1625). Shakespeare was the only dramatist to achieve four folio editions in the 17th century, so the publication of the four editions in relatively quick succession set the seal of distinction on Shakespeare’s reputation as England’s foremost playwright. Shakespeare’s Elizabethan and Jacobean plays, already a little old-fashioned in 1623, were among the first to be revived in the Restoration, when the theatres reopened for business after the enforced darkness of the puritanical Commonwealth. They have continued to be performed ever since.
The Printing of the First Folio
The publishers of the First Folio were the booksellers Edward Blount and father and son, William and Isaac Jaggard all members of the Stationer’s Company. William Jaggard is sometimes seen as an odd choice by Heminge and Condell to print the First Folio because he had previously published works by other authors under Shakespeare’s name, and in 1619 had printed new editions of 10 Shakespearean quartos to which he did not have clear rights, some with false dates and title pages which are referred to as the False Folio by Shakespeare scholars.
The printing of the First Folio was probably done between February 1622 and early November 1623. It was listed in the Frankfurt Book Fair catalogue to appear between April and October 1622, however modern consensus is that this was simply intended as advance publicity for the book. The first impression had a publication date of 1623, and the first recorded buyer of the First Folio was Edward Dering, an English antiquary, who made an entry in his account book on December 5, 1623, recording his purchase of two copies for a total of £2.
Some pages of the First Folio were still being proofread and corrected as the printing of the book was in progress. As a result, individual copies of the Folio vary considerably in their typographical error with around 500 such corrections having been made in this way with the typesetters changing out and resetting the type in the middle of printing. These corrections consisted only of simple typos and clear mistakes in their own work. There is much evidence here to suggest that the typesetters rarely if ever referred back to their manuscript sources.
One error in the printing process was that the play Troilus and Cressida was originally intended to follow Romeo and Juliet, but the typesetting was stopped, potentially over issues with rights to the play. It was later inserted as the first of the tragedies and does not appear in the table of contents.
Preface to the Folio and The Droeshout Portrait
Ben Jonson, one of the most important English dramatists of the Jacobean era, wrote a preface to the folio addressed “To the Reader” is sits facing the famous engraving of Shakespeare on the opposite page. The engraving opposite Johnson’s preface is known as the Droeshout portrait and it serves as the frontispiece for the title page of the First Folio. It is one of only two works definitively known to be a depiction of Shakespeare and is thought to be based on an equally famous oil painting known as the Chandos portrait. The copperplate engraving used by Martin Droeshout to create the portrait for the First Folio was subsequently reused for all three later folios. The plate began to wear out from frequent use and had to be heavily re-engraved and re-touched with each subsequent folio.
The Book Collector’s Prize
Of the surviving copies of the First Folio most are missing some of their original leaves, with only about 56 copies complete, and many of those have been “made-up” with leaves supplied from other copies. It was during the 19th century, when the First Folio became firmly established as a popular item with book collectors, that many “improvements” to copies were made, it was common for early calf bindings to be discarded and replaced with shiny red goatskin shimmering with gilt.
The most assiduous folio hunter of all time was the president of Standard Oil, Henry Clay Folger, who bought his first First Folio in 1903 and whose Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, DC, now has the world’s largest holdings, comprising 82 copies, of which 13 are complete. The vast majority of First Folios are similarly housed in major libraries, universities, and other institutional holdings. Only 27 or so copies remain in private collectors’ hands, and only six of those are complete.
Complete copies of the First Folio emerge in commerce once in a generation. The first complete copy of the 21st century was from the library of the Chicago collector, Abel E. Berland, sold at auction by Christie’s in New York, on October 9, 2001. Known as the Canons Ashby copy and bound in early panelled calf, c.1690-1730, it had passed three times through the hands of the famous Philadelphia bookseller, Dr A. S. W. Rosenbach. Like most complete First Folios, it was not perfect and had its title-leaf and two, possibly three, other leaves supplied from another copy. It sold for $6,166,000 to Paul G. Allen, co-founder of Microsoft
Nearly 20 years later, the same auction house sold a complete First Folio that had been bequeathed to Mills College in Oakland, California, for $9,978,000. The relatively small price uplift over two decades reflects the truth that no two copies of the First Folio are strictly alike. This copy was bound in full blind-stamped russia in about 1810 and had been shown at the 1951 Festival of Britain Exhibition of Books. It had the first leaf with Ben Jonson’s verse address “To the Reader” inlaid, a few letters on the title and a portion of the portrait restored, and the last leaf re-margined. It was 15mm shorter than the copy bought by Paul Allen, having been trimmed very close at the top of the leaves, often removing the upper box-frames. These factors were enough to keep it from breaking the $10m mark. Even so, it remains the most expensive work of literature ever auctioned.
Earlier this year, in 2023, we offered a First Folio for sale at £6.25 Million which has now sold.
A Wordsmith Without Equal
Shakespeare’s primacy as the earliest and greatest writer in modern English has led to some unsupportable claims made for him. It used to be argued that he was a preternaturally inventive wordsmith, with a huge number of original coinages attributed to him. But he wouldn’t have been so popular in his lifetime if he couldn’t make himself understood to the general playgoer. What Shakespeare displayed was an extraordinary linguistic ability to redeploy parts of speech in unexpected contexts, a process of transference known as functional shift. In Troilus and Cressida, for example, he describes how “Kingdom’d Achilles in commotion rages”, where he converts “kingdom” from a noun to an adjective. It’s the earliest instance of this usage recorded in the Oxford English Dictionary and just one of many such that we can assume to be Shakespearean creations. Shakespeare may not have plucked new words out of thin air (a phrase first found in The Tempest), but he had a special gift for combining words to create resonant phrases that made their way out of the First Folio into the English language. Only one other book, the King James Bible of 1611, has had such a profound and lasting influence on the common stock of English phrases.
William Shakespeare: Bard and Muse
It can be argued that Shakespeare’s is the shadow that all subsequent writers in the English language find themselves trying to escape from under. While Shakespeare was known for adapting existing stories and myths, it is his versions which have stood the test of time laying the foundations for subsequent re-imaginings and interpretations.
Many important modern writers, including Toni Morrison and Margaret Atwood, have created work either in response to or inspired by Shakespeare’s plays. The Bard’s ghost haunts the Scylla and Charybdis episode of James Joyce’s Ulysses, in which Joyce’s alter-ego Stephen Dedalus presents his “Hamlet theory” to a group of acquaintances in the National Library of Ireland.
The title of William Faulkner’s masterpiece, The Sound and the Fury, is taken from a line from MacBeth, as is Agatha Christie’s By the Pricking of my Thumbs, while David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest is taken from a line in Hamlet.
Even Disney has played its hand at Shakespearean adaptation most notably with The Lion King not to mention the countless film adaptations of Shakespeare’s work by famed directors such as Derek Jarman, Julie Taymor, Peter Greenaway and Kenneth Branagh.
Reinterpretations of Shakespeare’s work are not only limited to the Anglosphere with works in many other languages having been influenced by the plays collected in the First Folio; a particularly good example of this is Aime Cesaire’s Une Tempête, a post-colonial reimagining of The Tempest.
Sections of this article were previously printed in an issue of Antique Collecting.
For today’s audience, visualising Jane Austen is easy. In numerous recent TV and film dramatisations, the Regency era is communicated through a parade of empire line gowns, sedate formal dances and serene stately homes. So settled are we, in fact, on this familiar interpretation of Austen novels today, that it is easy to discount the fact that Austen has been imagined very differently in the past.
The earliest film adaptation of Pride and Prejudice in 1940, for example, was set in the Victorian period, in order that it might be marketed in the same vein as the wildly popular Gone with the Wind, which had appeared the previous year. It thus featured a cast of female characters in enormous Scarlett O’Hara style dresses and bonnets.
MGM Studios , via Wikimedia Commons
To the first audiences of Austen on screen, the novels were presented as 19th century romances, rather than the acerbic social commentaries of the previous century which appear on the page, and the endurance of this conception of Austen in the popular collective consciousness still holds a certain amount of power.
This was not the first time, however, that Austen had been misrepresented to make her more marketable. Henry James, in 1905, can be found deploring the way in which
the body of publishers, editors, illustrators, producers of the pleasant twaddle of magazines … found their ‘dear,’ our dear, everybody’s dear, Jane so infinitely to their material purpose, so amenable to pretty reproduction in every variety of what is called tasteful, and in what seemingly proves to be saleable form.
From the first illustrated editions, which began to appear in the 1830’s, the content of the novels was being subjected to subtle (and sometimes not-so-subtle) manipulation to suit what the publishers perceived as palatable to the audience’s tastes at the time.
Just as in TV, film and stage adaptations, the illustrations of a novel have the power to profoundly influence the audience’s perception and draw out different aspects; the domestic or the pastoral, the political or social, the familial or the romantic. They can also alter factors such as the perceived age range of the audience for the novels by accentuating either scenes of gothic melodrama or the lighter, cosier elements of the narratives. When considering historical illustrations of Austen’s books, we must keep in mind that illustrators’ choices could have been influenced by a number of factors we may never be able to puzzle out; a publishers’ brief, market considerations, current trends or fashions etc. The illustrators themselves may not even have read the novels cover to cover.
Austen’s novels did not appear in illustrated form until the early 19th century. Illustrated novels were expensive to produce, and even works celebrated from the time of publication (which Austen’s were not) were often not illustrated until later editions. The copyrights to all of Austen’s six major novels were bought in 1832 by publisher Richard Bentley, fifteen years after Austen’s death. It was Bentley whose publication of each in turn as part of his Standard Novels series cemented their place in the literary canon. The illustrations for these editions – each featured a steel-engraved frontispiece and a title page vignette – were the first visualisations of Austen to be seen by a wide audience, and thus impacted greatly upon the reception of her works in the cultural consciousness.
First Bentley Edition of Sense and Sensibility, with illustrated frontispiece after Ferdinand Pickering
This first interpreter of Austen was Ferdinand Pickering, illustrator of previous Bentley publications of the Gothic, romantic and domestic persuasion. Perhaps feeling most comfortable in this territory, Pickering duly provided illustrations for Austen’s novels which conformed to the mould of standard Victorian pot-boilers. Ignoring the Regency fashions that would be accurate to the setting of the novels, Pickering depicts female characters as wasp-waisted and voluminous-skirted, stepping with implausibly tiny feet through a series of scenes either domestically or dramatically preoccupied: in short, images familiar to readers from the post-gothic melodramas popular in the 1830s. Instances of surprise or strife are emphasised, almost to the extent of stretching the actual content of a scene to breaking point while leaving Austen’s native humour and mitigating satire unillustrated. For example, the image chosen for the frontispiece of Northanger Abbey depicts Henry Tilney on discovering Catherine Morland snooping in his late mother’s off-limits chambers. Catherine clasps her hands together beseechingly and the whole scene is bathed in menacing shadows. It is unclear, at a glance, whether Tilney is the villain of the piece rather than its hero. Historian and critic Thomas Babbington-Macaulay wrote to a friend of the Bentley edition: ‘Get a sight of the Book next time you go to a circulating library at Liverpool; and tell me whether Henry Tilney be not the most offensive Varmint man that ever you saw’. In reality, the scene, within the wider context of Austen’s mock-gothic novel, is intended as a send-up of exactly the kind of sinister moment Pickering has ultimately represented. The illustration, it seems, has rather missed the joke.
Pickering’s illustrations: Frontispiece to Northanger Abbey and title page vignette to Sense & Sensibility
Similarly misleadingly, the title-page vignette selected for Sense & Sensibility depicts an exaggeratedly gothic version of Marianne’s illness. The illustration, showing Marianne as a ghostly vision in frilled nightclothes being almost physically restrained by Elinor, would look more at home in Wuthering Heights, or another more gothically-disposed novel of the 19th century. While technically true to the novel, the choice of this scene (one of comparatively unrepresentative peril and drama in the larger context of the narrative) seems a strange introduction.
Indeed, Pickering’s tendency both to draw out and amplify gothic themes, and to place his characters in fashions contemporary to the 1830s, situated Austen’s novels so firmly in the context of the 19th century that she was often grouped with other Victorian novelists such as Charlotte Bronte and George Eliot in later literary discussion. This misappropriation was compounded by the fact that Bentley’s Standard Novels series of Austen’s work was reissued with Pickering’s illustrations until 1886. As it would have been through Bentley’s editions that many readers first approached Austen, her novels were effectively frozen in time as artefacts of early Victorian literature. When, in the mid-nineteenth century, other publishers issued illustrated editions of Austen’s work as the copyright on each novel expired, Pickering’s designs became the benchmark. Several illustrators chose to perpetuate the early Victorian fashions and setting. The illustrations for the 1851 Routledge edition of Pride and Prejudice by Sir John Gilbert, for example, have been criticised as rather lacklustre imitations of Pickering’s work, retaining the determinedly Victorian setting while shedding the sensationalist subjects. The resulting illustrations depict neat and demure heroines engaged in generic and passive activities, and are remarkable largely only for their lack of interest. Chapman & Hall’s 1870 ‘Yellowback’ edition also chooses Victorian dress for its characters but is, in contrast, notable for its bizarre choice of scene to illustrate; Lydia (we presume) is depicted in lurid colour at a soldiers’ encampment at Brighton, conversing with three officers, despite the fact that Austen never wrote this scene. Subsequent American editions of the novels, presumably taking their cue from the British, continued to illustrate characters in Victorian dress into the late nineteenth century.
Chapman & Hall ‘Yellowback’ edition of Pride & Prejudice, 1870
The first illustrations to make an attempt at period-appropriate representation were those created by William Cubitt Cooke for J. M. Dent & Company’s ten volume edition of Austen’s novels in 1892. Cooke produced thirty illustrations for Dent which made an attempt at representing Regency dress and furnishings, providing readers with a more accurate visualisation of the books as they actually appeared on the page, rather than a more superficial rendering which kept an eye firmly on marketability.
The edition, however, which would set the standard for Austen illustration was George Allen’s 1894 ‘Peacock’ Pride and Prejudice, illustrated by Hugh Thomson. So called because of the lavish peacock motif that appeared on the endpapers, title page and gilt-embossed cover, it featured over 160 illustrations and decorations. Its landmark status in the publishing history of Austen, as well as its attractiveness, ensure its continued collectability, with copies usually fetching prices in the low thousands. Thomson’s Austen was also the first to attempt to inject humour into illustrations of the novels. Whimsical headpieces, often not depicting scenes directly described by Austen but attempting to capture the light and ironical tone off the novels, appear at the head of each chapter. For example, the five Bennet daughters are shown in one instance seated, flanked on the left by a fussing Mrs Bennet and on the right by the odious would-be suitor Mr Collins, who inspects them. A small sign above the head of the middle sister (presumably Jane) reads ‘not for sale’. Thomson went on to illustrate the five other Austen novels after his defection from George Allen to Macmillan. When it came, however, to Mcmillan’s own edition of Pride and Prejudice, they were in something of a bind, as Thomson’s earlier illustrations for the novel belonged to George Allen. They therefore engaged another illustrator, Charles Brock, for the project.
the ‘Peacock’ Pride and Prejudice, illustrated by Hugh Thomson
Charles Brock and his brother Matthew must also be credited with shaping the visual trend of Austen, producing over two hundred illustrations across several editions and formats. Chief amongst their innovations was the use of coloured plates, as in the ten volume Austen edition of 1898 produced by J. M. Dent. Following the trend of historical accuracy that emerged in the 1890s, the Brocks’ illustrations depict characters in period costume inhabiting highly detailed scenes.
The Brock brothers reputedly collected period furniture and would have their friends model for scenes in their Cambridge studio. Brock’s illustrations also capture some of Austen’s characteristically arch humour in the scenes and captions chosen. A plate for Emma, for example, shows the obnoxious Mrs Elton in a rather gaudy dress asking “How do you like my gown?”
An illustration of Lydia for Pride & Prejudice by C. E. Brock
Though the popularity of illustrated editions of Austen continued into the 20th century, ensuring repeated illustrated interpretations, it was film adaptations that increasingly began to shape popular notions of how Austen’s novels looked. The first on-screen adaptation of Pride & Prejudice in 1940 starred Laurence Olivier and Greer Garson and was marketed heavily to theatre-goers and was seen by millions.
As mentioned above, it took advantage of the recent success of other book-to-screen adaptations, opting for lavish and exaggerated Victorian costumes and sets for maximum visual titillation. As with the illustrated editions, the prevailing trends of the day dictated the visual presentation of Austen. Almost from the advent of her popularity, Austen has been big business, and marketability continues to be the main factor affecting our conception of how the novels are visualised.
Items featured in this blog are drawn from a remarkably complete Beatrix Potter collection displayed by Peter Harrington in 2016. You can still view the catalogue online here, as well as our Beatrix Potter items currently in stock here.
Beatrix Potter (1866-1943) grew up in Bolton Gardens, Kensington, just round the corner from our Fulham Road shop, where she and her brother Bertram built quite a menagerie in the schoolroom at the top of the house, occasionally smuggling in animals without their parents’ knowledge. In 1890, Beatrix had her first drawings published, in a piece of holiday ephemera titled A Happy Pair. It features six illustrations of her pet rabbit Benjamin (the forerunner to Peter). He was a “handsome tame Belgian rabbit”, very fond of hot buttered toast, who would run into the drawing room when he heard the tea-bell:
Also on display we have a superb original manuscript featuring nine ink and watercolour drawings by Beatrix, drawn around 1896. Titled La Chanson de la mariée, it’s an amusing set of cartoons of a wedding, accompanied by a poem in French, which Beatrix has written out by hand. She copied these drawings from work by Henri Gerbault, a French illustrator and watercolourist, to improve her figure drawing, which she always acknowledged was a weak point – she once said “they are a terrible bother to me when I have perforce to bring them into the pictures for my own little stories”.
Around the same time she drew these figures, Beatrix was also pursuing a very different type of drawing. She was an amateur mycologist and scientific artist, and in 1896 began to work on a scientific paper on spore germination. We have a fascinating copy of Peter Rabbit inscribed to a J. Squire who helped her acquire a specimen as part of her research on the fungal properties of dry rot. He delivered the specimen to Bolton Gardens in a brown paper bag, where she hid it under a stone in the garden, for fear of her parents’ disapproval (“How I should catch it, my parents are not devoted to the cause of science”, she wrote in her journal). Quite understandable – given its destructive properties! Beatrix’s paper “On the germination of the spores of Agaricineae” was presented on her behalf on 1 April 1897 to the Linnean Society, as women were prohibited from speaking or attending; she noted that it was “well received” but required amendments, and she withdrew the paper. It was never published, and no copy exists today.
Mycological illustration courtesy of the Armitt Trust
Beatrix’s life in Kensington was rather lonely and sheltered, with close friendships discouraged by her parents. She had only her brother Bertram for companionship until he was sent to boarding school at the age of 11. Her happiest time in Bolton Gardens was perhaps with Annie Moore, who was hired when Beatrix was 17 years old as her German tutor and companion. After Annie’s marriage, the two stayed closely in touch, and Beatrix often wrote illustrated letters to Annie’s children. Of course, the most famous of these was the first incarnation of Peter Rabbit, sent to the eldest, five-year-old Noel, when he was sick with scarlet fever, on 4 September 1893. A few years later, in 1900, Beatrix thought it might make a small book, and borrowed it back to expand the story into a book. A percipient businesswoman, she knew exactly how she wanted to publish the story: it had to be affordable for “little rabbits” and in a small format – just the right size and weight for small hands. Unable to find a publisher who would accept her proposed format, she published Peter Rabbit herself in a private edition.
The privately-printed edition was ready on 16 December 1901 in an edition of 250 copies. Within two weeks it proved so popular that she commissioned a second impression. Meanwhile, Warne rethought their earlier rejection, and undertook the “Bunny book” project, as they termed it. It proved so popular that the Warne edition of 8,000 copies sold prior to publication; the collaboration between Potter and Warne would last almost the rest of her life.
Perhaps surprisingly, though, Peter Rabbit was not Beatrix’s favourite book. That honour goes to her second book, The Tailor of Gloucester. Again, it started life as a story for one of the Moore children, and was a Christmas present for Freda Moore in 1901. Just as she had done with Peter Rabbit, Beatrix first had the book privately printed (Warne had not yet published Peter Rabbit and she did not think they would want a second so soon). It is unique in the series with its period setting (Potter drew the costumes from the collection at the V&A museum), and was based on a true story that Potter had heard while staying in Gloucestershire: an elaborate waistcoat had been commissioned for a grand mayoral occasion, but the tailor lacked the time to complete it and needed another packet of cherry-coloured silk – though more prosaically, it was his two assistants who had secretly finished the work.
Even less well-known is a sequel of sorts to the Tailor of Gloucester – Wag-by-Wall, about a lonely old woman. Beatrix thought the two would make a pair, but the second book had a somewhat chequered road to publication: it was first written in 1909 under the title The Little Black Kettle, but the manuscript was left unfinished. Potter picked up the story in 1929, before again dropping it, and finally finished it in 1940 for The Horn Book Magazine. The editor liked it so much that she decided to hold it back for the 20th anniversary edition, where it was finally published in May 1944. Sadly, Beatrix died in December 1943, aged 77, and never saw the story in print.
Another story which took a while to see publication was The Tale of Jeremy Fisher. The idea originated with a picture letter to Eric Moore on 5 September 1893, which began: “My dear Eric, Once upon a time there was a frog called Mr. Jeremy Fisher, and he lived in a little house on the bank of a river…”. These illustrations were sold to the publisher Nister in 1894, and appeared in 1896 in two collections by Nister – Comical Customers and the Nister Annual.
Beatrix was disappointed that Nister refused to publish them as a small booklet, telling her that “we certainly cannot make a booklet of it as people do not want frogs now”. Potter bought back the copyright and blocks for the illustrations shortly after publication of the Tale of Peter Rabbit, and resumed work on the story after the death of her fiancé, Norman Warne. Shortly after Norman’s funeral, she left London to sketch in North Wales and the Lake District, and, needing a project to work on, was determined to see Jeremy Fisher finally published. Nine years after she had conceived the idea, her frog book was finally agreed for publication.
The year that Norman died marked a huge shift in Beatrix’s life. She bought Hill Top, a working farm in Near Sawrey, in the Lake District, with royalties from her books and a legacy from an aunt. From then on, her books also began to reflect more of her life there. We have a fascinating letter written around 1909, accompanying a copy of Ginger and Pickles, written by Beatrix to the previous owner of another farm she’d just bought. Ginger and Pickles was based on the village shop in Sawrey, owned by John Taylor. In the letter, she explains the book’s connection to him: “You will see it is dedicated to old John Taylor, he took such an interest in it, when I was sketching in ‘the shop’, but he just died after the type was set up and before he could have a finished copy … Poor old John was put in the book at his own request, the dormouse in bed is thought to be rather like him.”
With her royalties from the series, Potter amassed over 4,000 acres of land in the Lake District which she bequeathed to the National Trust on her death, together with strict instructions on conservation and land management, without which the Lake District would be a very different place today.
Victor Gollancz (1893-1967) was one of the revolutionary figures of 20th-century publishing. Everything about his publishing house was distinctive, from his business practices – he flouted convention, backed newcomers extravagantly, and held unique sway over the Book Society choices – the the appearance of his books. The earliest titles have striking jackets designed by the great Edward McKnight Kauffer, but these were soon superseded by the famous yellow jackets, a collaborative design between Gollancz himself and the typographer Stanley Morison, bristling with blurbs, recommendations, and reviews in black and magenta.
All the books in the collection are deeply uncommon, if not seriously rare, in this state. Gollancz’s business model depended on keeping costs low. First impressions were often produced in remarkably small print runs to test the market; any successes would be quickly put into a second or third impression.
ARMSTRONG, Martin. Venus Over Lannery – BOOK SOLD
London: Victor Gollancz Ltd, 1936
Octavo. Original blue cloth. With the dust jacket. Spotting to pages, in the toned dust jacket. A very good copy.
First edition, first impression. From the publisher’s archive, with their inkstamp to front free endpaper, title page and front panel of the dust jacket.
£95
Asa Baker. Mum’s the Word for Murder – BOOK SOLD
London: Victor Gollancz Ltd, 1939
Octavo. Original black boards, titles to spine red. With the dust jacket. Spine rolled, edges foxed. An excellent copy in the jacket with sunned spine.
First edition, first impression of the first of two mystery novels featuring El Paso sheriff Jerry Burke. From the publisher’s archive with their inkstamp to the front free endpaper.
£225
ASCH, Sholem. Mottke the Thief. Translated by Edwin and Willa Muir – BOOK SOLD
London: Victor Gollancz Ltd, 1935
Octavo. Original black cloth, titles to spine gilt. With the dust jacket. Edges foxed, spine slightly rolled; an excellent copy bin the jacket with sunned spine and some chips to extremities.
First edition in English, first impression. The novel was originally published in 1916 in Yiddish as Motke Ganev. From the publisher’s archive, with their inkstamp to the title page.
£225
BEVERIDGE, Albert J. Abraham Lincoln. 1809-1858. BOOK SOLD
London: Victor Gollancz Ltd, 1928
2 volumes, octavo. Original green cloth, spines lettered in gilt. With the dust jackets. Photogravure portrait frontispiece with tissue guard to each volume, 16 half-tone plates. Light spotting to edges, faint offsetting from plates. An excellent copy in the very faintly marked dust jackets with a few minor chips to no loss of lettering.
First UK edition, the Gollancz file copy with their ink-stamp to the dust jackets and front pastedowns, highly uncommon in this condition. Beveridge retired from politics in 1922 having unsuccessfully attempted to regain a seat in the Senate and dedicated his last few years to writing. “His great Abraham Lincoln, 1809-1858 (posthumously published in 1928) was so thorough and professionalized a biography that he might have incorporated more of Lincoln’s Whiggish political roots into his work; but Beveridge, a Republican progressive and former senator from Indiana, had become so disillusioned with his own party that he actually found very little to admire in Lincoln as a politician” (Guelzo, Abraham Lincoln, p. 456).
£375
COE, Charles Francis. Gunman – BOOK SOLD
London: Mundanus Ltd, Victor Gollancz Ltd, 1930
Octavo. Original orange cloth, title to spine black. With the dust jacket. Spine slightly rolled, tips bumped; an excellent copy in the jacket with some minor loss to foot of spine and nicks to head of spine.
First edition, first impression. From the publisher’s archive with stamp to front panel of the jacket, front pastedown and front free endpaper.
£325
CURTIS, Monica. Landslide – BOOK SOLD
London: Victor Gollancz Ltd, 1934
Octavo. Original black cloth. With the dust jacket. Spotting to pages, bumping to ends of spine, in the toned dust jacket with wear to extremities.
First edition, first impression. Publisher’s file copy with their ink stamp to front free endpaper and front panel of the dust jacket.
£150
DALY, Elizabeth. Unexpected Night – BOOK SOLD
London: Victor Gollancz Ltd, 1940
Octavo. Original black boards, title to spine red. With the dust jacket. Spine gently rolled; an excellent copy in the jacket with mildly toned spine.
First UK edition, first impression, of the first book in the “bibliomystery” series featuring the investigations of Henry Gamadge, an author, bibliophile, and forgery expert. It was first published in the US earlier the same year. From the publisher’s archive.
£250
De MEYER, John. God’s Children – BOOK SOLD
London: Victor Gollancz Ltd, 1935
Octavo. Original black cloth, spine lettered in yellow. With the dust jacket. Spine gently rolled in the toned dust jacket with light soiling to panels, spine sunned, wear to extremities. A very good copy.
First UK edition, first impression.
£125
De MEYER, John. Village Tale – BOOK SOLD
London: Victor Gollancz Ltd, 1938
Octavo. Original blue cloth. With the dust jacket. Light spotting to cloth and pages in the dust jacket with a sunned spine. A very good copy.
First UK edition, first impression. The publisher’s retained copy with their stamp to the title page, front free endpaper and front paste down of the dust jacket.
£125
10 DU MAURIER, Daphne. Gerald: A Portrait – BOOK SOLD
London: Victor Gollancz Ltd, 1934
Octavo. Original green cloth, titles to spine gilt. With the dust jacket. Photographic portrait frontispiece. Publisher’s yellow wrap-around band laid in. Cloth very faintly mottled, edges foxed. A very good copy in the slightly soiled and chipped dust jacket.
First edition of Du Maurier’s significant first Gollancz title, the Gollancz archive copy, with their ink-stamp to the title-page.. Her first novel, The Loving Spirit, “was published to considerable acclaim by Heinemann in February 1931. She immediately wrote second and third novels which confounded expectations by differing radically from her first, but it was her fourth book, Gerald, a frank biography of her father, written when he died in 1934, which made the greatest impact. It was published by Victor Gollancz, with whom she then began a long and fruitful partnership. Gollancz recognized that her strengths lay in narrative drive and the evocation of atmosphere. He encouraged her to develop these and the result was Jamaica Inn (1936), an instant best-seller” (ODNB).
£250
DUKE, Winifred. Skin for Skin.
London: Victor Gollancz Ltd, 1935
Octavo. Original black cloth, spine lettered in green. With the dust jacket. Edges and endpapers foxed. An excellent coy in the bright dust jacket with a sunned spine and two short closed tears to the rear panel.
First edition, first impression, the Gollancz archive copy with their ink-stamp to the front panel of the dust jacket and to the front pastedown. A scarce work of detective fiction, incorporating elements of true crime, scarce with just nine copies in libraries worldwide, and exceedingly hard to find in anything approaching this condition.
£225
(FASCISM.) SCHUTZ, W. W. Dr. German Home Front. – BOOK SOLD
London: Victor Gollancz Ltd, 1943
Octavo. Original blue cloth, spine lettered in gilt. With the dust jacket. Pages toned in the dust jacket with toned spine, faint stain to lower end of spine, mild soiling, pencil mark to front panel. A very good copy.
First UK edition, first impression. The publisher’s retained copy with their ink notation on the half title. Work which looks into the oppositions which were rising up in Nazi Germany.
£55
GLASPELL, Susan. The Morning is Near Us – BOOK SOLD
London: Victor Gollancz Ltd, 1943
Octavo. Original blue cloth, spine lettered in dark blue. With the dust jacket. Pages toned, in the toned dust jacket. A very good copy.
First UK edition, first impression. The publisher’s retained copy with their stamp to the title page, front free endpaper and front panel of the dust jacket.
£85
GOODCHILD, George, & C. E. Bechhofer Roberts. We Shot An Arrow – BOOK SOLD
London: Victor Gollancz Ltd, 1939
Octavo. Original black cloth, titles to spine orange. With the dust jacket. Minor spotting to edges; an excellent copy in the jacket with sunned spine.
First edition, first impression. From the publisher’s archive, with their inkstamp to the front panel of the jacket and the front free endpaper.
£575
GREEN, Paul. Wide Fields – BOOK SOLD
London: Victor Gollancz Ltd, 1929
Octavo. Original black cloth, spine lettered in green. With the dust jacket. Edges spotted, light tanning to free endpapers. An excellent, tight copy in the dust jacket a touch sunned and chipped on the spine.
First UK edition, originally published in the US the previous year, the publisher’s retained copy with their ink-stamp to the title-page. Wide Fields was first collection of short-stories by the noted dramatist who despite being “the son of a southern white farmer … from childhood was aware of the ills that beset blacks; he used literature to express his ardent belief in freedom and equality for all” (Encyclopaedia of the Harlem Renaissance: A-J p. 444-45). Among his admirers was Tennessee Williams, and a copy of Wide Fields was found among his possessions on his death in 1983 (Bradham Thornton, ed. Notebooks of Tennessee Williams, p. 314).
£250
HARGRAVE, John. The Imitation Man. BOOK SOLD
London: Victor Gollancz Ltd, 1931
Octavo. Original green boards, titles to spine gilt. With the dust jacket. A little foxing to edges; an excellent copy in the jacket with browned spine and a couple of chips to extremities.
First edition, first impression. From the publisher’s archive, with their inkstamp to the half-title.
£175
HOLT, Gavin. The Theme is Murder – BOOK SOLD
London: Victor Gollancz Ltd, 1938
Octavo. Original black cloth, titles to spine orange. With the dust jacket. Light foxing to edges; an excellent copy in the jacket with sunned spine.
First edition, first impression, featuring the first appearance of the series detective, Inspector Joel Saber. From the publisher’s archive, with their inkstamp to the title page.
£225
ILES, Margaret. Burden of Tyre – BOOK SOLD
London: Victor Gollancz Ltd, 1939
Octavo. Original black cloth. With the dust jacket. In the lightly sunned dust jacket. A very good copy.
First edition, first impression. From the publisher’s archive, with their inkstamp to front free endpaper, title page and front panel of the dust jacket.
£125
ISTRATI, Panait. The Bitter Orange-Tree – BOOK SOLD
London: Victor Gollancz Ltd, 1931
Octavo. Original green cloth, title to spine gilt. With the dust jacket. Spotting to page edges, spine gently rolled, archival stamp to title page, in the dust jacket with a touch of wear to edges. A very good copy.
First edition, first impression. From the publisher’s archive, with their inkstamp to the half-title.
£175
JOHNSON, Josephine. Jordanstown – BOOK SOLD
London: Victor Gollancz Ltd, 1937
Octavo. Original blue cloth, title to spine blue. With the dust jacket. Spine gently rolled, in the dust jacket with fading to spine, publisher’s pencil mark to front panel,
First edition, first impression. From the publisher’s archive, with their inkstamp to half title page.
£95
JONES, Doris Arthur. The Life and Letters of Henry Arthur Jones – BOOK SOLD
London: Victor Gollancz Ltd, 1930
Quarto. Original orange cloth. With the dust jacket. Black and white photographs throughout. Spotting to pages, in the dust jacket with spotting and soiling to panels, wea, creasingr and closed tears to extremities. A good copy.
First edition, first impression. Publisher’s file copy.
£50
MANN, Heinrich. Berlin.
London: Victor Gollancz Ltd, 1929
Octavo. Original black cloth. With the dust jacket. Soiling to cloth, spotting to pages in the toned dust jacket with wear to extremites, shallow chipping to ends of spine. A good copy.
First UK edition,second impression.
£45
MANNING, Leah. What I Saw in Spain. An introduction by D. N. Pritt.
London: Victor Gollancz Ltd, 1935
Octavo. Original red cloth. With the dust jacket. In the toned dust jacket with soiling to panels. A very good copy.
First edition, first impression. Publisher’s file copy with their ink stamp to title page.
£50
MARSHALL, Bruce. The Uncertain Glory.
London: Victor Gollancz Ltd, 1935
Octavo. Original black cloth. With the dust jacket. In the dust jacket with a faded spine, light chip to rear top edge and top end of spine. A very good copy.
First edition, first impression. Publisher’s file copy with their ink stamp to half title.
£125
MAURIAC, Francois. Vipers’ Tangle.
London: Victor Gollancz Ltd, 1933
Octavo. Original black cloth. With the dust jacket. In the dust jacket with faded spine, wear to extremties, shallow chip to lower end of spine. A very good copy.
First edition, first impression. Publisher’s file copy with teir ink stamp to title page.
£125
MEADOWS, Catherine. Friday Market.
London: Victor Gollancz Ltd, 1938
Octavo. Original black cloth. With the dust jacket. In the lightly sunned dust jacket. A very good copy.
First edition, first impression. Publisher’s file copy with their ink stamp to title page.
£150
MOLONY, William O’Sullivan. New Armour For Old.
London: Victor Gollancz Ltd, 1935
Octavo. Original black cloth. With the dust jacket. In the lightly soiled dust jacket with sunning to spine. A very good copy.
First UK edition, first impression. An Autobiography.
£85
MOON, Lorna. Dark Star.
London: Victor Gollancz Ltd, 1929
Octavo. Original black cloth, titles to spine in black and red, red top-stain. With the dust jacket. Spine gently rolled, edges lightly foxed; an excellent copy in the jacket with some shallow chips and nicks to extremities.
First UK edition, first impression. it was first published in the US earlier the same year. From the publisher’s archive, with their stamp to the title page.
£750
NEWTON CHANCE, John. The Devil in Greenlands – BOOK SOLD
London: Victor Gollancz Ltd, 1939
Octavo. Original black cloth, titles to spine red, illustrated endpapers. With the dust jacket. Boards gently bowed, faint foxing to edges; an excellent copy in the jacket with sunned spine.
First edition, first impression. From the publisher’s archive, with their stamp to the front panel of the jacket, the front endpapers and title page.
£325
NEWTON CHANCE, John. Rhapsody in Fear.
London: Victor Gollancz Ltd, 1937
Octavo. Original black cloth, titles to spine red. With the dust jacket. Spine rolled, text block foxed to edges; an excellent copy in the jacket with sunned spine.
First edition, first impression. From the publisher’s archive, with their stamp to the front panel of the jacket, the front pastedown, and title page.
£325
O’FLAHERTY, Liam. Hollywood Cemetery.
London: Gollancz, 1935
Octavo. Original black cloth, titles to spine in green. With the dust jacket. Spine lightly bumped at head and very gently rolled. An excellent copy in the dust jacket sunned on the spine and with a small chip at the foot.
First edition, first impression; the only edition in English (Czech and Italian translations appeared in 1936 and 1943 respectively), this the publisher’s retained copy, with their ink-stamp to the half-title. O’Flaherty wrote Hollywood Cemetery while in Los Angeles preparing the script for motion picture The Informer, for which he won an Academy Award. Scarce in this condition with the dust jacket.
£375
OKE, Richard. Frolic Wind.
London, Victor Gollancz Ltd, 1929
Octavo. Original black cloth, titles to spine green. With the original dust jacket. Some spotting to endpapers, but elsewhere a clean and bright copy in the dust jacket with just a few small nicks to edges, and some small stains to both panels. An excellent copy.
First edition, first impression. The publisher’s file copy with their stamp to the front panel of the dust jacket and front free endpaper, and small pencil annotations to jacket.
£250
OWEN, John. Many Captives – SOLD
London: Victor Gollancz Ltd., 1930
Octavo. Original black cloth lettered in yellow. With the dust jacket. Offsetting to endpapers in the dust jacket with sunning to spine, publisher’s pencil note to front panel, ink number to rear panel. A very good copy.
First edition first impression.The publisher’s file copy with their ink stamp to the half title.
£45
OWEN, John. The Shepard and the Child.
London: Victor Gollancz Ltd., 1929
Octavo. Original black cloth lettered in yellow. With the dust jacket. Spotting to pages, in the toned dust jacket with large chip to top of spine, light chipping to lower end of spine, soiling to panels, publisher’s pencil notation to front panel, ink number to rear panel. A good copy.
First edition first impression.The publisher’s file copy with their ink stamp to the half title.
£25
PAUL, Leslie. Men in May – BOOK SOLD
London: Victor Gollancz Ltd, 1936
Octavo. Original black cloth, spine lettered in green. With the dust jacket. Spine very gently rolled, light spotting to fore edge. An excellent copy in the spine-sunned dust jacket.
First edition, first impression of the author’s first novel, based on the General Strike of 1926. The publisher’s file copy, with their ink-stamp to the title-page and pencil-mark to the front panel of the dust jacket.
£275
PERRY, Tyline. The Owner Lies Dead – SOLD
London: Victor Gollancz Ltd., 1930
Octavo. Original black cloth lettered in red. With the dust jacket. Occasional spotting to pages, front hinge starting, in the dust jacket with faded spine, light soiling to panels, publisher’s pencil notation to front panel, ink number to rear panel. A very good copy.
First edition first impression.
£200
PHELAN, Jim. 10-A-Penny People – SOLD
London: Victor Gollancz Ltd, 1938
Octavo. Original blue cloth, title to spine blue. With the dust jacket. In the dust jacket with light sunning to spine, publisher’s pencil mark to front panel and ink number to rear panel. A very good copy.
First edition, first impression. From the publisher’s archive, with their inkstamp to half title page.
£150
PHILLIPS, Wendell.
Qataban and Sheba. Exploring Ancient Kingdoms on the Biblical Spice Routes of Arabia – SOLD
London: Victor Gollancz Ltd, 1955
Octavo. Original dark red cloth-textured boards, titles and vignette to spine gilt. 32 photographic plates, 5 diagrams to the text, double-page sketch map to centre of volume, map endpapers. An excellent copy in the bright dust jacket.
First edition. “In the spring of 1950 Wendell Phillips, a young palaeontologist turned explorer and archaeologist, led the first American archaeological team to excavate the major ancient cities along the spice routes of South Arabia. The project was sponsored by the American Foundation for the Study of Man (AFSM), which was founded by Phillips in 1949” (Potts, ed. Araby the Blest: Studies in Arabian Archaeology, p. 91). They excavated Timna, the ancient capital of the Qataban kingdom, and Marib, the Sabaean city believed by some to be the Sheba of the Old Testament. Scarce in this condition with the dust jacket.
£325
POLLACK, William. Talking About Cricket.
London: Victor Gollancz Ltd, 1941
Octavo. Original blue cloth. With the dust jacket. Mild fading to cloth along edges in the toned dust jacket with wear along top edges, publisher’s pencil note to front of panel. A very good copy.
£75
POWELL, S. W. A South Sea Diary.
London: Victor Gollancz Ltd, 1942
Octavo. Original blue cloth. With the dust jacket. black and white photographs throughout. Wear to extremities, tiny chip to mid rear panel, publisher’s ink number to rear panel and pencil note to front panel. A very good copy.
First edition, first impression. Publisher’s file copy with their ink stamp to title page. Travel narrative of an Englishmen who went to Tahiti and purchased a coconut plantation.
£65
SAYERS, Dorothy L. Begin Here. A War-Time Essay.
London: Victor Gollancz Ltd, 1940
Octavo. Original black cloth, titles to spine in gilt. With the dust jacket. Dent to front board, boards mottled; a very good copy in the jacket with toned spine and some nicks to extremities.
First edition, first impression, of the author’s essay written with the purpose of suggesting “to a few readers some creative line of action which they, as individuals, can think and work towards the restoration of Europe.” (Preface).
£125
SAYERS, Dorothy L. The Devil to Pay.
London: Victor Gollancz Ltd, 1939
Octavo. Original blue cloth, title to spine gilt. With the dust jacket. Spine a little faded, an excellent, bright copy in the mildly toned jacket.
First trade edition, first impression. It was preceded by the first acting edition printed for the first production of the play at Canterbury in June 1939. The publisher’s file copy, with their inkstamp to the front panel of the dust jacket, front pastedown, and title page.
£375
SAYERS, Dorothy L. The Man Born to be King. A Play-Cycle on the Life of Our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. Written for Broadcasting. Presented by the British Broadcasting Corporation Dec. 1941–Oct. 1942. Producer: Val Gielgud – BOOK SOLD
London: Victor Gollancz Ltd, 1943
Octavo. Original blue cloth, titles to spine gilt. With the dust jacket. Mildly toned contents; an excellent copy in the jacket with toned spine and some nicks to extremities.
First edition, first impression. From the publisher’s archive, with their inkstamp to the title page.
£175
SITWELL, Edith. I Live Under a Black Sun. A Novel.
London: Victor Gollancz Ltd, 1937
Octavo. Original black cloth, spine lettered in gilt. With the dust jacket. Foot of spine and upper outer corner of front board very lightly bumped. An excellent copy in the spine-sunned and lightly soiled dust jacket.
First edition, first impression of Sitwell’s first novel, “based on the life and loves of Jonathan Swift” (ODNB). The publisher’s retained copy with their ink-stamp to the half-title. Scarce in the dust jacket.
£275
(SOVIET RUSSIA; FRENCH POLITICS.) HERRIOT, Edouard. Eastward from Paris. Translated by Phyllis Megroz.
London: Victor Gollancz, 1934
Octavo. Original black cloth, titles to spine gilt. With the dust jacket. Spine bumped and creased, boards slightly bowed, some foxing to contents. A very good copy in the jacket with some nicks to edges, and shallow chip and short closed tear to foot of spine.
First edition, first impression of the book in which the thrice-elected Premier recounts his visit to Soviet Russia in the summer of 1933. Herriot largely avoids political issues in his narrative, and instead presents himself as an enquiring traveller. The book was first published in Paris earlier the same year under the title Orient. From the publisher’s archive, with their stamp to the front panel of the jacket and front pastedown.
£65
STRAHAN, Kay.
Footprints – BOOK SOLD
London: Victor Gollancz Ltd, 1929
Octavo. Original black boards, titles to spine orange. With the dust jacket and green wraparound band. Spine rolled, small bump to foot of front board; an excellent, bright copy in the jacket with toned spine.
First UK edition, first impression. It was first published in the US earlier the same year, and won the USA Scotland Yard Prize for the best detective story of the year. From the publisher’s archive.
£375
STRAHAN, Kay Cleaver. Death Traps.
London: Victor Gollancz Ltd., 1930
Octavo. Original black cloth lettered in red. With the dust jacket. Front hinge cracked, offsetting to end papers, in the dust jacket with light soiling to panels, light shelf wear, publisher’s pencil notation to front panel and ink number to rear panel. A very good copy.
First edition first impression. The publisher’s file copy with Archive stamp to half title.
£150
STRAHAN, Kay Cleaver. October House.
London: Victor Gollancz Ltd., 1931
Octavo. Original black cloth lettered in red. With the dust jacket. Occasional spotting to pages, in the dust jacket with chip to front top edge and top end of spine, creasing and several inch closed tear to lower end of spine and lower front panel. A good copy.
First edition first impression. The publisher’s file copy.
£75
TAYLOR, Gay. No Goodness in the Worm.
London: Victor Gollancz Ltd, 1930
Octavo. Original black cloth, spine lettered in green. With the dust jacket. Spine-ends lightly bumped, even strip of browning to each free endpaper as usual. An excellent copy in the dust jacket with a sunned spine lightly rubbed at the extremities.
First edition, first impression, the publisher’s retained copy with the corresponding pencil-mark to the front panel of the dust jacket. The author’s first novel, also published in the US later the same year, was partly based on her illicit relationship with writer A. E. Coppard. Taylor, born Ethelwyne Stewart McDowall, married Harold Taylor in April 1920 and with him co-founded the Golden Cockerel Press, together publishing Coppard’s first collection of short stories, Adam and Eve Pinch Me, in 1921 (ODNB).
£475
TEILHET, Darwin and Hildergarde. The Broken Face Murders. A Baron von Kaz Detective Story – BOOK SOLD
London: Victor Gollancz Ltd, 1940
Octavo. Original black cloth, spine lettered in orange. With the dust jacket. Scattered faint mottling to spine and rear board. A very good copy in the spine-sunned dust jacket with a blue ink-stain to the foot of the rear panel.
First UK edition, first impression, the publisher’s retained copy with their ink-stamp to the title-page. Originally published in the US earlier the same year, this first UK edition is highly uncommon in this condition with the dust jacket.
£225
TEILHET, Darwin and Hildergarde. The Crimson Hair Murders. A Baron von Kaz Detective Story – BOOK SOLD
London: Victor Gollancz 1937
Octavo. Original black cloth, spine lettered in orange. With the dust jacket. Edges lightly foxed, faint spotting to margins of prelims. An excellent copy in the bright dust jacket.
First UK edition, first impression, the publisher’s retained copy with their ink-stamp to the front pastedown, title-page and front panel of the dust jacket. Originally published in the US the previous year, this first UK edition is represented in only five copies in libraries worldwide (of which two in the British Library), and is considerably scarce in commerce in this condition with the dust jacket.
£500
52 WOLFERT, Ira. Tucker’s People.
London: Victor Gollancz Ltd, 1944
Octavo. Original green cloth, spine lettered in gilt. With the dust jacket. An excellent copy in the jacket with sunned spine and some nicks to extremities.
First UK edition, first impression of this novel about a New York gangster. First published the previous year in the US. From the publisher’s archive with their stamp to the front panel of the dust jacket, the front free endpaper, and the title page.
£250
Here at Peter Harrington Dover Street we like to showcase the very best in rare books, encompassing everything from the keenest heights of political economy to the most nostalgic depths of children’s literature. There really are some astounding things here and, since it would be a little selfish to keep them all to ourselves, we have decided to share a special selection of three exceptionally interesting items every week with the wider world. I hope you enjoy reading about these books from time to time – you can click through from the picture to the full entry on our website, where you can also browse our entire gallery and rare book stock. Additionally, if you find yourself in the area, please drop by 43 Dover Street and I’d be happy to show you around.
Moon in Aquarius; Mars in Leo; Saturn in Libra; Venus in Taurus; or, yours Zodiacally, W. B. Yeats [#78199]
Yeats’s obscure but excellent Stories of Red Hanrahan is one of my favourites. In it Yeats, ever the hungry mythographer, conjures up his own folkloric figure, a wandering poet (or “gleeman”), the passionate, bitter and generally out-on-his-arse Owen Hanrahan, and sends him careering across ancient Ireland, loving, hating, drinking, grubbing food, stealing wives and weaving both spells and curses with his magic words. It’s worth a read. Fourteen years later, in The Tower (1928), Yeats would remember his creation in some of his best lines:
“I myself created Hanrahan
and drove him drunk or sober through the dawn
…
He had but broken knees for hire
and horrible splendour of desire”.
As such, it was a great privilege when I was thrown a first edition of this book (Dun Emer Press, 1904), inscribed by Yeats himself, and was asked to decode the inscription:
Plainly enough it was inscribed to a Mrs Worthington “from her friend the writer, with pleasant memories of the Hudson”. The recipient was an American society hostess, and W.B. would have met her on his American literary tour. No surprise, really – Jack Yeats described her as “a sort of duchess over here”, and W.B. had a thing for aristocrats. The trouble, or the fun, came with the symbols beneath Yeats’s signature:
A layman might recognise in the first a moon (or banana), and perhaps in the fourth and seventh the standard signs for Male and Female. After some time engaged in that feverish process of alchemical research whereby the bookseller turns from layman into professor, I worked out that these symbols were astrological. They are comprised of four sets of two – with four celestial bodies and four zodiacal signs. The male and female ones are in fact Mars and Venus, and the whole set reads thus: Moon in Aquarius, Mars; Saturn in Libra; Venus in Taurus. The third character is hard to decipher, but the seven provide enough information to find the link to Yeats – these are the zodiacal positions of the celestial bodies as they were on June 13th 1865, which was Yeats’s birthday, making this his Zodiacal signature. Anyone who knows about Yeats’s dealings with the Golden Dawn, who understands the obsession with alchemy that governed Yeats’s imagination in the second phase of his life as surely as the gods of Gaelic folklore had governed it in the first, or who has read A Vision (1925, in which he codified in particular how one’s astrological birthmark dictates the thematic arc of one’s life), will appreciate the resonance of this inscription. We know of no other book so inscribed.
“His eye fell on the yellow book” (from The Picture of Dorian Gray) – a superb first edition copy in the original yellow wrappers of A Rebours by Joris Karl Huysmans [#59280]
One of the especially innervating experiences of working in this world is that you occasionally run across real copies of books that you had only hitherto encountered within other books – the whole thing tends to bring the world of fiction that much closer to reality, which is probably not healthy. Nevertheless, here at Dover Street we have a little yellow book – unremarkable, perhaps, except that this is the “yellow book” that “absorbed” Oscar Wilde’s character Dorian Gray into a world of utterly abandoned sensual decadence. The yellow wrappers were used in Paris to signify lascivious content, and, by the time Wilde was writing The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), Huysman’s A Rebours (1884) had become the notorious archetype of such books. It tells of a Parisian aristocrat who devotes his life to aesthetic experimentation. He keeps, as two infamous examples, a garden of poisonous flowers and a jewel-encrusted tortoise (which eventually dies under the weight of its decorations). I shall give you Wilde’s incantation of it here:
“His eye fell on the yellow book that Lord Henry had sent him. What was it, he wondered. He … flung himself into an arm-chair and began to turn over the leaves. After a few minutes he became absorbed. It was the strangest book that he had ever read. It seemed to him that in exquisite raiment, and to the delicate sound of flutes, the sins of the world were passing in dumb show before him. Things that he had dimly dreamed of were suddenly made real to him. Things of which he had never dreamed were gradually revealed. It was a novel without a plot and with only one character, being, indeed, simply a psychological study of a certain young Parisian who spent his life trying to realize in the nineteenth century all the passions and modes of thought that belonged to every century except his own, and to sum up, as it were, in himself the various moods through which the world-spirit had ever passed, loving for their mere artificiality those renunciations that men have unwisely called virtue, as much as those natural rebellions that wise men still call sin. The style in which it was written was that curious jewelled style, vivid and obscure at once, full of argot and of archaisms, of technical expressions and of elaborate paraphrases, that characterizes the work of some of the finest artists of the French school of Symbolistes. There were in it metaphors as monstrous as orchids and as subtle in colour. The life of the senses was described in the terms of mystical philosophy. One hardly knew at times whether one was reading the spiritual ecstasies of some mediaeval saint or the morbid confessions of a modern sinner. It was a poisonous book. The heavy odour of incense seemed to cling about its pages and to trouble the brain. The mere cadence of the sentences, the subtle monotony of their music, so full as it was of complex refrains and movements elaborately repeated, produced in the mind of the lad, as he passed from chapter to chapter, a form of reverie, a malady of dreaming, that made him unconscious of the falling day and creeping shadows.”
All bit sickly perhaps – but thankfully the book is locked behind glass, and I have only schoolboy French, so I should be safe.
“The Devil can speak quite bad French very well though some who have heard him say that he has a strong Dublin accent” – The Cat and the Devil, by James Joyce [#99491]
James Joyce is not generally known as a children’s book author (though once can tell perhaps from the opening lines of A Portrait of the Artist that he had a feel for it). He did, however, write just such a book, The Cat and the Devil, which told of a small Loire-side town’s pact with the Devil, and how it resulted in an unlikely feline friendship. It was written especially for his grandson Stephen, and was never published in his lifetime. This is the first UK edition, wittily illustrated by Gerald Rose, and would make a great gift for Joyce-freaks, cat-lovers, and Satanists alike.
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