Paul Verlaine.

An exceptionally fresh copy

First edition, first impression, of the author's first book, an uncut copy with an exceptional example of the rare dust jacket. Nicolson's Verlaine is rare in the dust jacket - we have only seen one other, and can trace none at auction - this copy, almost untouched and unopened, is rarer still in such condition.

Harold Nicolson (1886-1968) was a diplomat and Bloomsbury author, who had married Vita Sackville-West in 1913 (more an "open" than a "lavender" marriage, since although both Vita and Harold continued to have homosexual relationships with numerous different people throughout their lives, they were also devoted to one another and had two sons). He had served in the foreign office during the First World War (being selected to hand the Germans Britain's declaration of war in 1914), and would go on to have a career in the foreign service and in politics. He was encouraged to write by his wife and this biography of the French poet Paul Verlaine is his first publication - the first of several studies of literary figures including Tennyson, Byron, Swinburne and Sainte-Beuve, as well as a political novel Public Faces (1932).