FABERT, Abraham.

Voyage du roy a Metz, l’occasion d’iceluy: ensemble les signes de resiouyssance faits par ses habitans pour...

[Metz, Fabert,] 1610.

A splendid hand-coloured and gilt copy of the first edition of this handsome festival book commemorating Henri IV’s entry into Metz in March 1603, published seven years after the event and in the same year that Henri was assassinated by François Ravaillac.

£60000

LEWIS, Wyndham.

Tarr.

London, The Egoist Ltd., 1918.

First English edition, published in an edition of 1000 (of which 87 distributed gratis). T. S. Eliot thought the book ‘remarkable’. Set in pre-war Paris, Tarr pits its eponymous English artist (‘a caricatural self-portrait of sorts’) against Kreisler, a self-destructive German...

£300

LEWIS, Wyndham.

The Caliph’s Design. Architects! Where is your Vortex?

London, The Egoist Ltd., 1919.

First edition, a pamphlet of art criticism, particularly an attack on ugly modern architecture; there is (rare) praise for Cézanne and Picasso.

£400

LEWIS, Wyndham.

The Wild Body.

London, Chatto & Windus, 1927.

First trade edition, first issue binding; there was also a special edition of 85 signed copies. A collection, in a much reworked form, of some early sketches written in Brittany, some of which had been published in 1909.

£250

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

LEWIS, Wyndham.

Snooty Baronet.

London, Cassell & Co. Ltd., 1932.

First edition, first issue binding, the first of three books Lewis published with Cassell, and the first of his novels not to find an American publisher.

£400

LEWIS, Wyndham.

The Old Gang and the New Gang.

London, Desmond Harmsworth, 1933.

First edition, binding variant (1), a work on ‘youth cults’ and the rise of European dictatorships. Bridson’s review was not especially complimentary, noting ‘that peculiar “kiddish” idiom which Mr. Lewis uses to advantage in his satiric novels and to little purpose elsewhere … We can excuse...

£250

LEWIS, Wyndham.

Men without Art …

London, Cassell & Company Limited, [1934].

First edition; Lewis takes on and demolishes Hemingway, Faulkner, and Woolf. Bridson reviewed the book in The Criterion in January 1935, pp. 335-337.

£200

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

LEWIS, Wyndham.

Left Wings Over Europe: or, how to make a War about Nothing.

London, Jonathan Cape, [1936].

First edition, first printing, a reiteration of the delusions about Hitler that Lewis had first presented in Hitler (1931), alongside a rejection of the Internationalism he had argued so firmly for in The Art of Being Ruled and would later espouse once more. Lewis afterwards dismissed the...

£500

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

LEWIS, Wyndham.

Blasting & Bombardiering …

London, Eyre & Spottiswode, 1937.

First edition, first issue binding, of one of Lewis’s best and best-known works. It was the first of two largely autobiographical books, this covering 1914-1926 as stated on the jacket, and is now remembered in particular for its coining of the much-discussed phrase ‘The Men of 1914’, referring...

£500

LEWIS, Wyndham.

Wyndham Lewis the Artist.

From ‘Blast’ to Burlington House’ … London, Laidlaw & Laidlaw, [1939].

First edition, first issue.

£125

LEWIS, Wyndham.

‘W. B. Yeats’ [from New Verse new series, I:2, May 1939].

Offprint of an article from New Verse, loosely an obituary of Yeats who had died in January that year. Lewis was typically ambivalent, referring to the ‘stuffed language’ of Yeats’s early poems. But ‘Yeats has given me a sort of kick: a kind of soft, dreamy kick. I am obliged to him.’

£100

LEWIS, Wyndham.

America, I Presume.

New York, Howell, Soskins & Co., [1940].

First edition, Lewis’s first impressions of America after his abrupt departure thence in September 1939. He was to remain in North America for the duration of World War WII.

£75

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

LEWIS, Wyndham.

Rude Assignment. A Narrative of my Career up-to-date … Illustrated with works by the Author.

London, Hutchinson & Co., [1950].

First edition, first impression, ‘one of the most readable of his later works ... also one of the most illuminating’ (Bridson, Filibuster).

£275

LEWIS, Wyndham.

Rotting Hill …

London, Methuen & Co. Ltd., [1951].

First edition, inscribed ‘To Geoffrey / Benedictions / Wyndham Lewis’. Rotting Hill was a collection of stories, ‘no more political than “some of Charles Dickens’ books, and all by Mr. Shaw”’ (Bridson, The Filibuster), in that ‘today our lives are saturated by’ politics....

£750

LEWIS, Wyndham.

Self Condemned.

London, Methuen & Co. Ltd., [1954].

First edition, second impression (June 1954), one of Lewis’s most successful works, a novel based on his self-imposed exile in Canada during World War II. Eliot thought the work one of Lewis’s best, ‘a novel of almost unbearable poignancy’. Bridson and Lewis had corresponded about the work, then...

£200

LEWIS, Wyndham, and D. G. BRIDSON.

Typescript for broadcast: ‘Satiric Verse … The text of a lecture delivered at Harvard University...

Transmitted 9 July and 23 August 1957.

Although a recording of Lewis reading from ‘One Way Song’ was made at Harvard in 1940, the lecture that accompanied it, ‘Satiric Verse’, was not then recorded. For the 1957 broadcast it was read by Walter Allen ‘from Lewis’s own manuscript notes’. Several other sections were read by Stephen...

£1200