ID: 1740
The Augustan Books of Modern Poetry.
SASSOON, Siegfried

Category: First Edition, Poetry, Signed

Place/Publisher/Date:
London, Ernest Benn. 1930.

Description: First edition, 4th impression; 8vo; original cloth boards. Author's presentation inscription to front free endpaper, 'Edith Olivier, former tenant of Fitz House, from the present occupant, Aug 1932.' Sassoon has also added some textual graffiti, namely a black and white photograph of himself as a young boy pasted to the title page with the word 'Observer' on a banner hung from his shoulders. The photograph was taken on the occasion that he and his brothers acted as pages when his aunt Rachel Beer had organised a stand for the Observer (of which she was the editor) at the Hotel Cecil for the 1896 Press Bazaar. Two humorous colour illustrations pasted to title verso and to final blank end paper, a small circular floral watercolour tail-piece design at the end of text. Sassoon has also added the words 'Died about 1986' in ink to his brief printed biography and on page 27 he has underscored one line, 'I have sat silent; angry at what they uttered'. Edith Olivier was a novelist, her first novel, The Love-Child being written when she was 55. She was also a confidante and hostess in the aesthetic, upper-class homosexual circles centred on country house life in Wiltshire, which included Sassoon, Osbert Sitwell, and Cecil Beaton. Good some spotting, the cloth is rubbed and partly faded.

Price £1,000.00