Eliot handset by Woolf
ELIOT, T.S. The Waste Land. Printed and Published by Leonard & Virginia Woolf at the Hogarth Press, Richmond. 1923.
8vo. Original blue marbled paper boards probably by Vanessa Bell, white paper label on front cover printed in black in simplest and least common state, without rules or asterisks, sometime rebacked in blue cloth; pp. 35, i [publisher's ads]; a little rubbing to edges, a little occasional light browning, pencil annotations to pp. 6-7, but generally a very good bright copy preserved in custom-made cloth fall-down-back box. Provenance: ffep with pencil signature of Robert Newton, author of Leaves of Quest: A fundamental exploration of love in the early poetry of T.S. Eliot (1978).
First English edition, of which about 460 copies were printed. The book was handset by Virginia Woolf and provided her with her most difficult technical challenge due to the innovative line-spacing of the poem. Eliot was very pleased with the result and considered this edition to be superior to the US edition of 1922 but it caused Virginia some anxiety. She wrote to a friend that "I have just finished setting up the whole of Mr Eliot's poem with my own hands - you see how my hand trembles".
In 1921, having taken time off from his job at Lloyds Bank for what would now be called depression, Eliot spent three weeks in Margate, on the South-East coast of England. Sitting in Nayland Rock shelter on the promenade, he wrote “some 50 lines” of The Waste Land, among them direct influence from where he sat: “On Margate Sands…I can connect / Nothing with Nothing. / The broken fingernails of dirty hands.” (Losasso 2019).
This theme of despair, and its powerful vision of urban alienation spoke to a generation of disillusioned young post-war readers, with some critics hailing it as a masterpiece, and others denouncing it for its allusiveness (the US poet William Carlos Williams disliked the modernist style, claiming in his autobiography that it ‘returned us to the classroom’). Nonetheless, the poem remains one of the most influential of the twentieth century.
Gallup, state 3.
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