Recent Acquisitions

  1. AIKEN, Conrad.

    Thee.

    New York, George Braziller, 1967.

    First trade edition, inscribed ‘For Geoffrey and Joyce [Bridson] / this little hymn of love / from Conrad / 1968’.

    £250

  2. POUND, Ezra.

    Cantos 110–116 …

    printed & published by the Fuck You / press at a secret location in the lower east side, New York City, USA, 1967.

    Unauthorised edition (unsurprisingly), no. 261 of 300 copies. The contents are extracts and include a number of apparently unidentified lines; this piracy forced the publication of Drafts and Fragment of Cantos CX–CXVII (1969).

    £150

  3. WATSON, Sheila.

    ‘The Great War, Wyndham Lewis and the Underground Press’, a special issue of artscanada, November 1967, issue...

    The recordings included are three sections from One-Way Song, made at Harvard in 1940 alongside his lecture, and ‘Marshall McLuhan recalls Lewis’.

    £50

  4. REXROTH, Kenneth.

    An Autobiographical Novel …

    Garden City, NY, Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1966.

    First edition, inscribed ‘In friendship / for Geoffrey Bridson / Kenneth Rexroth SF June 66’.

    £300

  5. AUDEN, Wystan Hugh.

    Louis MacNeice, a memorial Address, delivered at All Souls, Langham Place on 17 October, 1963.

    Privately printed for Faber & Faber, [1963].

    First edition, one of 250 copies, of Auden’s memorial address for Louis MacNeice, with the printed order of service and newspaper cuttings of poems on MacNeice, including ‘The Cave of Making’ by Auden (The Listener, 1 October 1964).

    £150

  6. [SASSOON, Siegfried.] SURTEES, [Robert Smith]; Lionel GOUGH, editor.

    Hunting Scenes from Surtees.

    London, Rupert Hart-Davis, 1953.

    Sassoon’s proof copy of Hunting Scenes from Surtees, with pages left blank for the inclusion of his as-yet unwritten introduction.

    £850

  7. AIKEN, Conrad.

    Ushant, an Essay.

    New York & Boston, Duell, Sloan and Pearce / Little, Brown and Company, [1952].

    First edition, inscribed ‘For Geoffrey [Bridson] from Conrad. Ex – Xmas 1956’. Ushant, Conrad’s ‘autobiographical narrative’, is often considered his most significant work in prose.

    £300

  8. ELIOT, Thomas Stearns.

    Two typed letters, signed, and one secretarial letter, to the poet and broadcaster D. G. Bridson, on Faber...

    1952-7.

    In 1937 Geoffrey Bridson had mounted a radio production, with Eliot’s blessing, of The Waste Land – it ‘made quite remarkable radio, but I have to confess that Eliot did not share my own enthusiasm for the result’ (Prospero and Ariel), particularly after cuts were made to the recording....

    £1500

  9. REYES, Alfonso.

    Corrected carbon typescript, signed, of an essay entitled ‘Chesterton y los titeres’ [Chesterton and the puppets].

    [Buenos Aires?, c. 1952–3.]

    Corrected carbon typescript of Alfonso Reyes’s essay entitled ‘Chesterton y los titeres’, concerning G.K. Chesterton’s play The Surprise, a religious allegory written in 1932 but first published posthumously in 1952.

    £1000

  10. LEWIS, Wyndham.

    America and Cosmic Man.

    London and Brussels, Nicholas and Watson Ltd., [1948].

    First edition, second state binding as always (the first, in green cloth, was rejected by Lewis as ‘hideous’ and was used on only 3 trial copies). In hand by 1943, not finished until 1946 and then rejected by American publishers until it finally found a British home in 1948, America and Cosmic Man...

    £200

  11. WILLIAMS, William Carlos.

    Paterson [Books 1, 2, 3 & 4].

    Norfolk, New Classics, [1951]. [with:]

    First collected edition of Books One to Four and first edition of Book Five; inscribed on the front free endpaper of One to Four (in Williams’s distinctive scrawl, in two different pens after the first ran out of ink) ‘D.J. [i.e. G.] Bridson with my compliments / William...

    £1250

  12. FLINDERS, Matthew.

    Narrative of his Voyage in the Schooner Francis: 1798. Preceded and followed by Notes … by Geoffrey Rawson...

    [London,] The Golden Cockerel Press, 1946.

    No. 327 of 750 copies, of which the first 100 were specially bound in full green morocco.

    £650

  13. RUYRA, Joaquim and Carles FONTSERÈ, illustrator.

    La fi del món a Girona.

    Paris, [Gaston Hallépée], [31 July] 1946.

    First separate edition, one of fifteen numbered copies on Rives paper with a suite of twelve illustrations signed by the artist, of this Catalan short story describing a child’s apocalyptic nightmare, set against the backdrop of the author’s hometown of Girona, brought to press by Catalan exiles...

    £450

  14. HUGHES, Langston. 

    Shakespeare in Harlem. 

    New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1942.

    First edition of this wartime collection of poems, inscribed shortly after Hughes and Bridson met for the first time: ‘For Geoffrey Bridson, with the friendship, and regards of Langston Hughes. New York, January 28, 1944’.

    £1000

  15. LEWIS, Wyndham.

    The Vulgar Streak.

    London, Robert Hale Ltd., 1941.

    First edition, first impression, a scarce work because of wartime paper shortages and, possibly, the destruction of a portion of the first impression in the Blitz; certainly Robert Hale’s offices were bombed and the records destroyed, and the work was reprinted within a month.

    £750

  16. [ANGLO-SOVIET DIPLOMACY.] 

    Papers regarding the Anglo-Soviet Negotiations 1939.  Presented by the Secretary of State for Foreign...

    London, His Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1939. 

    A proof copy, complete with typed errata attached, of this collection of ninety-five papers relating to the negotiations between the Soviet and British governments between March and December 1939. 

    £750

  17. LEWIS, Wyndham.

    The Revenge for Love.

    London, Cassell & Co. Ltd., [1937].

    First edition, very scarce in the dust-jacket, of ‘one of Lewis’s finest novels … a brilliant novel of character’ (Bridson, The Filibuster), set in pre-Civil War Spain and centred on an incident of Communist gun-running on the border. ‘Here for once, Communism is accepted as a...

    £1250

  18. MITCHISON, Naomi; Wyndham LEWIS, illustrator.

    Beyond this Limit …

    [London,] Jonathan Cape, [1935].

    First edition. This was Lewis’s only collaboration with Mitchison but she arranged for the publication of his Left Wings over Europe the following year, and they remained friends until his death. 32 designs by Lewis served as the inspiration for Mitchison’s narrative.

    £75

  19. LEWIS, Wyndham. 

    Doom of Youth …

    London, Chatto & Windus, 1932. 

    First English edition, one of Lewis’s scarcest works (only 549 copies avoided destruction).  Doom of Youth began life as a series of seven articles on youth politics in Time and Tide in June–July 1931, rounded off with a pair by G.K. Chesterton; it was expanded and first published...

    £2000

  20. PRIESTLEY, J. B.

    Angel Pavement …

    London, William Heinemann Ltd, 1930.

    First edition, the deluxe issue, no. 308 of 1025 copies signed by the author.

    £150