Added to your basket:
A.E.H. A.W.P.: a Classical Friendship.

Checkout now

Printing in full for the first time five letters from the poet and classical scholar A. E. Housman to A. W. Pollard, Keeper of Printed Books at the British Museum, this explores a friendship that was both intimate and formal. The story told by the book’s editor, H. R. Woudhuysen, begins with the exuberance of brilliant undergraduates at Oxford. Yet Housman’s mysterious failure to gain even a pass degree condemned him to a decade’s drudgery before he could take up academic life once more. In the meantime he contributed translations to Pollard’s Odes from the Greek Dramatists, and Pollard crucially suggested the title for his book of poems, A Shropshire Lad. Bibliographical exchanges follow, before Housman’s final short letter movingly harks back to Oxford days and reveals at last a lifelong emotional commitment. The edition is limited to 350 numbered copies, letterpress printed, with a tipped-in facsimile of Housman’s last letter to Pollard.

You may also be interested in...

BARKER, Nicolas.

At First, All Went Well… & Other Brief Lives.

This book brings together eighty obituaries written by Nicolas Barker. The first were published in 1966 and the last in 2018. Print links them all: they were printers, publishers, librarians, booksellers or book collectors, their lives joined by a common dedication to the printed word and all that goes with it.

Read more

[COLUMBUS.] QUARITCH, Bernard, and Michael KERNEY.

The Spanish Letter of Columbus … A facsimile of the original edition published by Bernard Quaritch in 1891. With an Introduction by Felipe Fernández-Armesto and essays by Martin Davies on Pere Posa and the printing of the Spanish Columbus Letter at Barcelona in 1493 and by Anthony Payne & Katherine Spears on Quaritch, the Spanish Columbus Letter, and America 1890–1892. Edited by Anthony Payne.

Over the centuries, booksellers have contributed much to the elucidation and sometimes to the falsification of historical documents. The story of the first printed account of the New World, usually known as Christopher Columbus’s Letter to Santángel or simply the Columbus Letter, illustrates both themes.

Read more