Available Copies from Independent Booksellers
Price: US$768.35 + shipping
Description: First edition, first impression, casebound issue, inscribed by the author, one of 500 copies, from a total edition of 1000; 8vo; publisher's blue cloth, titles to spine gilt, with the dust jacket, tiny patch of fading at the top of the spine but an exceptional copy in the nicked and somewhat tanned dust jacket. This one of 500 copies in the preferred cloth bound state, from a total edition of 1000. With the author's signed presentation inscription to the front free endpaper, 'Austin Gill from Palinurus Paris 1945'. The recipient was remarkably, a linguist and professional football player. After a globe-spanning career in various civil service roles, Gill was appointed head of the Parisian branch of the British Council (August 1944) and was in that role at the time of this book's inscription.
Seller: Shapero Rare Books, London, United Kingdom
[CONNOLLY, Cyril]. The Unquiet Grave - A Word Cycle. By Palinurus. Horizon, London, 1944.
Price: US$2250.00 + shipping
Description: 8vo, illustrated, original cloth, t.e.g., dust jacket. Spine slightly sunned, otherwise a fine copy in jacket, faintly sunned along the spine panel. Spine slightly sunned, otherwise a fine copy in jacket, faintly sunned along the spine panel First edition, hardcover issue, one of 500 copies printed on Barcham Green handmade paper by the Curwen Press. Of the 1000 sets of sheets printed, 500 were reportedly bound in cloth and 500 were bound in wrappers. Presentation copy, inscribed by Connolly to his friend Tom Driberg on the front free endpaper: "Tom with much love / from Cyril - " Tom Driberg, later ennobled as Baron Bradwell of Bradwell, a poet in his youth, a journalist (author of "The Talk of London" column under the pseudonym of "William Hickey" in the Daily Express), a member of the British Communist Party and later long-standing Labour MP (and Chairman of the Labour Party), the author of a sympathetic account of Guy Burgess and a suspected spy, a promiscuous homosexual and High Church Anglican, Driberg is the subject of a biography by Francis Wheen entitled The Soul of Indiscretion: Tom Driberg, Poet, Philanderer, Legislator and Outlaw - His Life and Indiscretions. One of the most civilized, and civilizing, of modern books, The Unquiet Grave is a compilation of the "doubts and reflections of a year" on "art, love, nature and religion." Begun in 1940, "The Unquiet Grave," as Connolly reflected ten years later in the introduction to the revised edition, "is inevitably a war-book." Although it was an attempt "to extricate himself from the war and to escape from his time and place into the bright empyrean of European thought," it was also an attempt to alleviate "a private grief - a separation for which he felt himself to blame . a struggle against propaganda . and an optimistic determination to prove how near and necessary to us were the minds and culture of those across the channel who then seemed quite cut off from us, perhaps for ever. To evoke a French beach at that time was to be reminded that beaches did not exist for mines and pill-boxes and barbed wire but for us to bathe from and that, one day, we would enjoy them again." "As a signal of distress from one human being to another The Unquiet Grave went unanswered, but the suffering was alleviated. As a demonstration of the power of words, however, . the work was an object-lesson. . ?La pensee console de tout'." Virtually the entire book is quotable, a fact to which Ernest Hemingway attested when he wrote: "It is a book which, no matter how many readers it will have, will never have enough".
Seller: James S. Jaffe Rare Books, LLC, ABAA, Deep River, CT, U.S.A.