GRAHAME, Kenneth. Pagan Papers.

The Great God Pan in the English Countryside

GRAHAME, Kenneth. Pagan Papers. London: Elkin Mathews and John Lane and Chicago: Stone and Kimball. 1894.

8vo. Publisher’s green cloth, spine lettered directly in gilt, top-edge gilt, the others uncut; pp. viii, 165, [1 (colophon)], [2 (blank)], 14 (advertisements), [2]; hinges cracked, somewhat sunned, spine discoloured, spine ends worn with small loss at head, top-edge slightly dusty; lightly toned throughout, a few spots to title; a good copy; 1895 ownership inscription of Percy Coleman, Oxford (b. 1872) to front free endpaper, with publisher’s tipped-in limitation slip.

First edition of the first book by the author of The Wind in the Willows, one of 450 copies printed for the English market, with a title-page designed by Beardsley.

The Pagan Papers comprises eighteen essays, including ‘The Romance of the Road’, on the charm of old country roads, and ‘The Rural Pan’, in which Grahame protests the ‘iron horse’ of industrialism and argues that whilst cities are the domain of Apollo and Mercury, Pan shuns ‘both iron road and level highway’ and instead prefers ‘to foot it down the sheep-track on the limitless downs’.

Whilst working at the Bank of England, the thirty-four-year-old Grahame began publishing his work in periodicals, becoming a contributor to the National Observer at the invitation of its editor, the poet William Ernest Henley (best remembered for the 1875 poem ‘Invictus’). Henley urged Grahame to send some of his short stories to John Lane at the Bodley Head, culminating in the publication of the present work; thereafter Grahame became a regular contributor to The Yellow Book. All but one of the Pagan Papers had previously appeared in the National Observer.

Samuels Lasner 53; Vallance 67.

SKU: 2125991