ADVANCE COPY FOR REVIEW
LEWIS, Wyndham.
Count your Dead they are Alive or a New War in the Making.
London, Lovat Dickson Limited, [1937].
8vo, pp. vii, [1], 358; publisher’s yellow cloth, printed in blue with a design by Lewis, white dustjacket printed in black with a similar design by Lewis; slightly foxed at extremities and to fore-edge, but a very good copy in a good jacket (edges reinforced on verso); bookplate of the journalist and later friend of Lewis D. G. Bridson, with scattered pencil marks by him in the margins; laid in loose is a publisher’s review request slip giving the date of publication as 26 April 1937.
£250
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First edition. ‘Perhaps his worst political squib … Count Your Dead takes up the argument for an Anglo-German rapprochement where Left Wings over Europe had left off, using the issue of “non-intervention” in the Spanish War as an additional ground for attacking British policy in Europe’ (Bridson). It employs a persona, ‘Ned’, literary executor to one ‘Launcelot Nidwit’, whose leftist standpoint is laid out in 24 ‘Thoughts’.
See Bridson, ‘Ned and the Dead’, The Filibuster, pp. 166-187. Pound & Grover A24a; Morrow & Lafourcade A24.
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The Jews, are they human?
First edition, Lewis’s first avowedly antifascist text, an argument against antisemitism written after the first draft of The Hitler Cult but published nine months earlier. Lewis had visited Germany, and the Warsaw Ghetto, in 1938, and had been left disturbed. ‘Perhaps because he had come to realise just how wrong he had been in his original belief that Hitler himself was not anti-Semitic, Lewis felt himself impelled to speak up on behalf of the Jews as they were becoming increasingly known to the British … too much had been written about the Jews on the grounds of common humanity, and far too little on the grounds of common sense. His appeal is, therefore, to the intelligence rather than to humanitarian feeling, though “it is extremely unintelligent, it is as well to remember, not to be humane”’ (Bridson, The Filibuster).