POUND, Ezra.. A Draft of XXX Cantos.. , 1930.

Price: US$1921.30 + shipping

Description: 141pp Hours Press, Paris 1930. 1st edition, first impression. 1 of 200 unnumbered copies on Canson-Mongolfier Soleil velin M. R. V. Paper. Initials by Dorothy Shakespear. Original buff linen boards. Spine very slightly marked, otherwise a very good copy.

Seller: Anthony C. Hall, Bookseller ABA ILAB, Isleworth, MIDDX, United Kingdom

Ezra Pound (Jacob Bronowski). A Draft of XXX Cantos. The Hours Press, 1930.

Price: US$2950.00 + shipping

Condition: Very Good

Description: Jacob Bronowski's REVIEW COPY with his inked name and 1930 date on front free endpaper--visible in photo. Covers are discolored--visible in photo. Top text block dusty--visible in photo. Interior is lightly foxed throughout--photo is typical of how the others look. "What thou lovest well remains."

Seller: Dela Duende Books, Palm Desert, CA, U.S.A.

POUND, Ezra.. A Draft of XXX Cantos.. Paris: Hours Press, 1930, 1930.

Price: US$3842.59 + shipping

Description: First edition, first impression, number 31 of 200 copies printed on Canson-Montgolfier soleil velin paper, from a total edition of 212 copies; there were also 10 signed copies on Texas Mountain paper, and 2 copies on vellum. This publication marks the first appearance of the poems that would make up Pound's Cantos, his magnum opus. When Cyril Connolly wrote The Modern Movement in 1965, he selected XXX Cantos as "the best work in Pound's 'poem of some length'". Connolly remarks that "one enters them like a sunlit church with a service going in a dark corner and suddenly the music pierces. A moment later all is muttering and mumbling". The Hours Press was owned and operated by Nancy Cunard, heiress to the Cunard shipping fortune. She first met Pound in 1915, when he approached her mother for support for Joyce and Wyndham Lewis. Cunard was able to fulfil an ambition to learn hand-printing when William Bird, proprietor of Three Mountains Press, agreed to sell her his press and types for £300. By late 1928, she had set herself up at Reanville, 50 miles from Paris, intending to publish experimental literature, with an emphasis on poetry: Pound's developing cantos suited her aims perfectly. Gallup A31a; Connolly 66. Octavo. Original grey buckram, spine and front cover lettered in red. Woodcut initial letters by Dorothy Shakespear. Bookplate of South African industrialist Sir Ernest Oppenheimer (1880-1957) and ink shelfmark to front pastedown. Spine slightly toned and faded, a few small marks to cloth, contents almost entirely unopened: a near-fine copy.

Seller: Peter Harrington. ABA/ ILAB., London, United Kingdom

POUND, Ezra.. A Draft of XXX Cantos.. Paris Hours Press, 1930.

Price: US$3932.50 + shipping

Description: First edition, number 107 of 200 copies printed by François Bernouard for Nancy Cunard's Hours Press on Canson-Mongolfier Soleil velin M.R.V. Paper; 8vo; decorative initials in oriental style by Dorothy Shakespear Pound, remnants of a small bookshop label to the rear paste down, one or two spots as often,; publisher's natural linen, titles to upper board and spine in red, edges uncut, some mild foxing to the linen (endemic for the Hours Press edition), spine lettering just a touch faded but again far less than usual; housed in a tan calf backed cloth box. This publication of Pound's first 30 Cantos was landmark in both his career and the history of modernist poetry. 'These Cantos. represent the best in Pound's "poem of some length". There are more lyrics and fewer chunks of prose than in the later, not so many economic propositions and ideograms, and some beautiful passages on the Homeric world and renaissance Italy. I prefer them to all the rest except for some passages in the Pisan Cantos.' (Connolly) Gallup A31b; Ford (Published in Paris), pp. 278-79; Connolly (The Modern Movement), 66.

Seller: Shapero Rare Books, London, United Kingdom