LARKIN, Philip; Anthony THWAITE (editor). Collected Poems. London: The Marvell Press and Faber and Faber. 1988.
8vo. Original dark olive cloth lettered in white to the spine, in the dustwrapper with Sue Linney's drawing of Larkin to the front panel, priced £16.95 to the front flap; pp. [1], xxviii, 330, [8]; a sharp, fine copy, in like wrapper.
A particularly attractive first impression of the first collected Larkin.
Edited by Larkin's friend, fellow poet and executor, Anthony Thwaite, this volume prints all the published poems, along with a selection previously unpublished, in chronological order of composition. Later ousted by the less comprehensive, if more immediately user-friendly edition (still in print), also edited by Thwaite, which presents each of the poet's four published collections as issued, with the uncollected poems in appendices. This edition, however, with dates of composition printed at the foot of each poem (drawn from manuscript notebooks), and an appendix giving the ordering of poems in the published collections, allows the reader to witness the growth of a great poet. Published on 10th October 1988, 11,563 copies of this first impression were printed. Such was the appetite for a Collected Larkin, a further 8460 copies were printed later the same month, and another 12,700 the next.
Bloomfield A19.
SKU: 2125769