Shackleton’s South: is my copy a first edition?

Shackleton’s South: is my copy a first edition?

 

The Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition (1914-1917)

Shackleton’s Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition was the last great undertaking of the heroic age of Antarctic exploration. He embarked in 1914 on the Endurance to make the first traverse of the Antarctic continent: a journey of some 1,800 miles from sea to sea. In 1915 the Endurance was sunk by pack ice, leaving Shackleton and his 27 crew members in smaller boats that were ill equipped for the rough Weddell Sea. They sailed to Elephant Island, where they made an encampment from two upturned boats. Shortly thereafter, Shackleton, Worsley, and Tom Crean made a gruelling trip for help, which they found at a whaling station on the north side of South Georgia. Subsequently, four separate attempts were made to rescue the remaining crew members on the desolate Elephant Island. By the time they were rescued, the men had survived for five and a half months on a diet of seals and penguins. Shackleton’s expedition succeeded in creating a polar epic of bravery and leadership. An astonishing scientific discovery was made on 5 March 2022, when the Endurance was discovered in the Weddell Sea. It was found intact, just four miles south of the last location recorded in 1915.

 

South – The Story

South is a polar classic told in Shackleton’s distinctive style. He notes in the preface: “I think that though failure in the actual accomplishment must be recorded, there are chapters in this book of high adventure, strenuous days, lonely nights, unique experiences, and, above all, records of unflinching determination, supreme loyalty, and generous self-sacrifice”. Shackleton is sure that it “will be of interested to readers who now turn gladly from the red horror of war and the train of the last five years to read, perhaps with more understanding minds, the tale of the White Warfare of the South”.

 

 

 

Is your copy a first edition, first impression?

The account quickly became popular, and it was published in 14 editions and 46 impressions. The first edition was published by William Heinemann and issued in four impressions. The following six points are a collector’s guide to identifying a first edition, first impression and to assess condition.

What does it look like?

The binding is in a dark blue cloth with the spine lettered in silver. The front cover is decorated with a silver vignette of the Endurance, based on the photograph “The Long, Long Night” by Frank Hurley. The back cover has the blind stamp of Heinemann. The edges of the book block are trimmed, and the top edge has a faint blue colour.

 

 

Which impression is it?

The publisher is listed as William Heinemann on the title page. Later impressions are noted as such on the verso of the title page; this page will be blank in first impressions.

 

 

 

What is the paper quality like?

First impressions are printed on poor-quality paper which is prone to toning. Later impressions are printed on improved paper and will appear whiter.

 

 

 

 

Do you have the right collation?

The first impression must have the collation “2 pp., xxii, 376 pp.” and an errata slip tipped onto p. 1. The second and third impressions have a similar collation though without the errata slip, as the errors have been corrected. The fourth impression is also without the errata slip, though with two additional pages in the preliminaries (pp. xxiii-xxiv) plus an addendum on the last index page. All impressions have a colour frontispiece, 87 half-tone plates, and a colour folding map at the end. The frontispiece has a tissue guard with the text “In the Pride of her Youth”, while the half-tones are identified by their well-defined dot structure. Check that your map is not a later photocopy, as maps are sometimes removed from books and sold separately.

 

 

What is the condition like?

Shackleton’s book, produced while the effects of the First World War were still a reality, is rarely encountered in collectible condition. The poorly crafted binding is likely to split at the joints and the silver printing is prone to oxidizing. A fine copy is without any of these flaws.

 

 

Does it have a dust jacket?

A dust jacket for this title is a nice to have, not a need to have. They are incredibly scarce, so if one is present, it is likely tinted in light blue and the text and image of the Endurance are printed in black. We have also encountered a few examples in a cream colour with the lettering and image printed in blue.

Written by Cecilie Gasseholm, Travel Specialist

“Not of an age, but for all time”: The Legacy of Shakespeare’s First Folio

“Not of an age, but for all time”: The Legacy of Shakespeare’s First Folio

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.

A pair of hands holding open Shakespeare's First Folio on the first page of 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.

Two pages from the First Folio.

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.

Frontispiece from Shakespeare's First Folio with the author portrait.

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 section of text from the Shakespeare play, Hamlet.

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.

Is my Harry Potter book valuable? How to tell if your copy is a first edition

Is my Harry Potter book valuable? How to tell if your copy is a first edition

This comprehensive article will help you establish whether you have a first edition Harry Potter on your hands. If you do have a first edition and are interested in selling it, please contact us on our Sell To Us page.

J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series has gained immense popularity, critical acclaim and commercial success worldwide, and first editions of her books have very quickly become collectable. By far the most valuable book in the series is the first, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, published on 30 June 1997 by Bloomsbury in London.

But to have any real collectable value, it has to be a copy of the first edition, first impression (also known as the first printing). This means the very first batch of books off the press, of which there were only a few thousand.  Reprints of Philosopher’s Stone (and even first editions of the later books in the series) have much lower values, in part because so many more of them were printed.

Harry Potter first edition, softcover issue

First, what do the books look like? The first printing was bound in two different ways. The rarest is the hardback issue, with a cover of laminated boards. Only 500 copies were bound this way, and 300 of those were sent to libraries. Because library books receive so much wear and tear we are left with only 200 copies in potentially fine collectable condition, and these rarely appear on the market. The other binding was a regular paperback of which a few thousand copies were produced for sale.

Next , how do you tell whether your copy, which may look very similar to the one pictured above, is really a valuable first edition?

To be a first edition, in either hard or soft cover, there are four very important issue points, all of which your book must have:

1. The publisher must be listed as Bloomsbury at the bottom of the title page. See photo below:

2. The latest date listed in the copyright information must be 1997.

3. The print line on the copyright page must read “10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1”, ten down to one, exactly. The lowest figure in the print line indicates the printing. (For instance, if your copy has “20 19 18 17”, it’s a less valuable seventeenth printing.)

First edition number line.

You may have been told that you have a first printing if the copyright is in the name of “Joanne Rowling”, but that’s not true. All early printings of this title have the same copyright statement.

This is what the whole back of the title page should look like:

Back of title page in the first edition of Harry Potter.

4. On page 53, in the list of school supplies that Harry receives from Hogwarts, the item “1 wand” must appear twice, once at the beginning and once at the end. This mistake was corrected in the second printing of the book (although it re-appeared in some later printings).

Mistake on page 53.

5. On the back cover there is a missing “o” in “Philospher’s Stone”.

Philosopher’s spelled as Philospher’s with the missing “o”.

If your book meets all these requirements then congratulations, you have a first edition! Depending on the binding and condition, it could be worth anywhere from many hundreds to tens of thousands of pounds.  If you’re interested in selling it, or would like to have a custom protective box made to house it, then please contact us. To see the Harry Potter books we currently have for sale please click here.

Though both the paperback and hardback first editions of the Philosopher’s Stone are of value, this is not the case with the other books in the series. For the other titles, it is only the first hardback edition with the dust jacket that have collectable value. If you have a copy of one of these titles that meets all these requirements below, and that you would like to sell, please contact us.

Chamber of Secrets must have been published in 1998 by Bloomsbury with no mention of subsequent edition, publisher, or later date on the copyright page, and have a printing number sequence of “10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1”.

Chamber of Secrets first edition copyright page

Prisoner of Azkaban must have been published in 1999 by Bloomsbury with no mention of subsequent edition, publisher, or later date on the copyright page, and have a printing number sequence of “10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1”. The most valuable copies are the first issue, which must have “Joanne Rowling” as the author instead of “J. K. Rowling” on the copyright page, and a dropped line of text on page 7.

 

The last four titles in the series, Goblet of Fire, Order of the Phoenix, Half-Blood Prince, and Deathly Hallows, must have the words “First Edition” printed on the copyright page. The print run for the first edition of all of the last four titles was very large, and as a result, even first edition copies in the dust jackets in fine condition are fairly commonly found, and not presently of high value. We are currently interested in acquiring signed copies only of these titles.

Goblet of Fire copyright page

Browse all currently-available Harry Potter books here.

The Origin of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol

The Origin of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol

It may be the most loved Christmas Story ever written. Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol was a bestseller when it was published in 1843, and has never been out of print. It has inspired hundreds of stage and film adaptations and has influenced the way people around the world view Christmas. Dickens wrote four other Christmas books in the years following, yet none of them had the same impact.  What makes A Christmas Carol so special?

In February of 1843, Charles Dickens and his friend the Baroness Burdett-Coutts became interested in the Ragged Schools, a system of religiously-inspired schools for the poorest children in Britain. Bourdett-Coutts had been asked donate to them, and she requested that Dickens visit the school at Saffron Hill and report back to her. The author, having experienced poverty and child labour himself, was deeply concerned with its elimination, and believed that education was an important way to achieve this. But he was shocked by what he saw at Saffron Hill. “I have seldom seen”, he wrote to Bourdett-Coutts, “in all the strange and dreadful things I have seen in London and elsewhere, anything so shocking as the dire neglect of soul and body exhibited in these children” (Mackenzie, Dickens, pp. 143-44).

All that year the Saffron Hill children stayed in Dickens’ mind, and he briefly considered writing a journalistic piece on their plight. Then in October, while visiting a workingmen’s educational institute in Manchester, he suddenly thought of a way to address in fiction his concerns about poverty & greed, and A Christmas Carol was born. Once back in London, Dickens began writing “at a white heat” (ODNB), telling his friend Cornelius Felton that while composing he “wept and laughed and wept again, and excited himself in a most extraordinary manner… and thinking whereof he walked about the black streets of London, fifteen and twenty miles many a night when all the sober folks had gone to bed” (Letters of Charles Dickens, Macmillan & Co., 1893, pp. 101-02).

It was a deeply personal and cathartic experience. Though Dickens hoped to elicit concern for poor children, represented in the story by Tiny Tim, he also wrote from a darker place. He had grown up poor and was still acutely conscious of money, never feeling comfortable that he had enough (one of the reasons he wrote A Christmas Carol was to increase his earnings during a slow period). And yet he distrusted the instinct to hoard it, and donated much to the needy. It was from these anxieties that he created Ebenezer Scrooge, one of the greatest examples of redemption in all of literature, with a life story remarkably similar to Dickens’. Scrooge is Dickens imagining “what he once was and what he might have become” (Ackroyd, Dickens, p. 412).

Dickens finished writing in only six weeks, though he was also working on Martin Chuzzlewit, and celebrated “like a madman” (Letters, p. 102). He arranged with Chapman & Hall to publish the story on a commission basis, giving him the freedom to design the book to his own high standards. Bound in pinkish-brown cloth, it included elaborate gilt designs on the cover and spine, as well as gilt edges, hand-coloured green endpapers (which were later changed to yellow because the green tended to rub off), four coloured etchings, and four uncoloured engravings. Despite the expense of printing and binding such a volume, the price was set at a low five shillings, which contributed to its popularity.

First Edition of A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens

A copy of the first edition of A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens (1843).

As soon as it appeared, A Christmas Carol was “a sensational success… greeted with almost universal delight” (ODNB). William Makepeace Thackeray called it, “a national benefit and to every man or woman who reads it a personal kindness” (Fraser’s Magazine, February 1844). Published only a week before Christmas, six thousand copies sold by Christmas Eve, with sales continuing into the New Year and a pirated edition also selling briskly, much to Dickens’ dismay.

A Christmas Carol struck such a chord because it was informed by Dickens’ own troubled life, his ambivalence toward the wealth he was accruing as a successful author, and his deeply held beliefs about goodness, charity, and the sin of institutionalized poverty.  His skill as an author was drawing from the world around him, and from within himself, universal themes that have resonated with millions of readers across the years. Indeed, there seems to be something for almost everyone, at every time, in this little book. As the novelist and biographer Peter Ackroyd put it,

A Christmas Carol takes its place among other pieces of radical literature in the same period… But clearly, too, there are many religious motifs which give the book its particular seasonal spirit; not only the Christmas of parties and dancing but also the Christmas of mercy and love… But it combined all these things within a narrative which has all the fancy of a fairy tale and all the vigor of a Dickensian narrative. There was instruction for those who wished to find it at the time of this religious festival, but there was also enough entertainment to render it perfect ‘holiday reading’; it is rather as if Dickens had rewritten a religious tract and filled it both with his own memories and with all the concerns of the period. He had, in other words, created a modern fairy story. And so it has remained. (Ackroyd, p. 413.)

 

“A Mass of Obscenity”: The Suppression of The Rainbow by D. H. Lawrence

“A Mass of Obscenity”: The Suppression of The Rainbow by D. H. Lawrence

The Rainbow - D. H. Lawrence

Rare first edition of The Rainbow by D. H. Lawrence, 1915.

The story of the 1960 trial of Lady Chatterly’s Lover, D. H. Lawrence’s 1928 novel of sexual awakening, is well known. But fewer are aware of the circumstances surrounding one of the author’s earlier books, The Rainbow, which was nearly as controversial as its successor.

Methuen published The Rainbow in September 1915, but quickly withdrew it from sale in the face of almost universally hostile reviews and impending prosecution. “Its religious language, emotional and sexual explorations of experience, and sheer length had given its readers problems, but it was Ursula’s lesbian encounter with a schoolteacher in the chapter ‘Shame’ which had finally condemned it in the eyes of the law and of a country now focused on conflict” (ODNB).  At Bow Street magistrates’ court on November 13 it was banned as obscene, with the result that half of the print run of 1250 copies was destroyed.

One of the copies that survived is the one depicted above, which we recently acquired (BOOK SOLD). What makes this copy evocative of the time and circumstances is that the original owner cut from the Times an account of the book’s suppression and pasted it on to the inside of the rear cover, as if to say, “This copy and I are part of this”:

Newspaper Account of the Suppression of The Rainbow

Newspaper account of the suppression of D. H. Lawrence’s The Rainbow, pasted into the back of a first edition.

As an account of the attempted destructed of ideas the report dire, and the circumstances almost destroyed Lawrence’s writing career. But, given the end result for his novels and literary reputation, I think we can allow ourselves a little chuckle at the authorities’ expense. Here’s the complete text of the piece:

At Bow-street Police Court on Saturday, Messrs. Methuen and Co. (Limited), publishers, Essex-street, Strand, were summoned before Sir John Dickinson to cause why 1,011 copies of Mr. D. H. Lawrence’s novel “The Rainbow” should not be destroyed. The defendants expressed regret that the book should have been published, and the magistrate ordered that the copies should be destroyed and that the defendants should pay £10 10s. costs.

Mr. H. Muskett, for the Commissioner of Police, said that the defendants, who were publishers of old standing and recognized repute, offered no opposition to the summons. The book in question was a mass of obscenity of thought, ideas, and action throughout, wrapped up in language which he supposed would be regarded in some quarters as an artistic and intellectual effort, and he was at a loss to understand how Messrs. Methuen had come to lend their name to its publication. Mr. Muskett read extracts from some Press criticisms of the work and continued that upon the matter being brought to the notice of the authorities a search warrant was at once obtained. This was executed by Detective-inspector Draper, who was given every facility by the defendants. He seized a number of copies of the book at their premises and afterwards obtained other copies from the printers, Messrs. Hazell, Watson, and Viney.

A representative of Messr.s methuen said that the agreement to publish the book was dated July, 1914. When the MS. was delivered it was returned to the author, who at the defendant’s suggestion mad ea number of alterations. The firm did not receive it back until June 4 last and again they protested against certain passages. Other alterations were then made by the author, after which he refused to do anything more. No doubt the firm acted unwisely in not scrutinising the book again more carefully, and they regretted having published it.

The Magistrate, in making an order as above, said it was greatly to be regretted that a firm of such high repute should have allowed their reputation to be soiled, as it had been, but the publication of this work, and that they did not take steps to suppress it after the criticisms had appeared in the Press.

Follow this link for our complete selection of rare books by D. H. Lawrence.