RYLANDS, George “Dadie”. Poems. London: The Hogarth Press. 1931.
Tall 8vo. Paper boards printed in a dark green, brown and blue herring-bone design, white paper label to front cover with black lettering; unpaginated with untrimmed edges; toning to spine with slight bumping at head, otherwise a very good, clean copy; authorial inscription to front free endpaper “Edward Playfair/ with the author’s love/ Dec: 12th 1931” (see below).
First limited edition, number 197 of 350 hand-printed copies signed by the author, this copy further affectionately inscribed to Edward Playfair.
Leonard and Virginia Woolf published two volumes of George “Dadie” Rylands’s poetry, Russet and Taffeta (1925) and Poems (1931). They had also published his fellowship dissertation from King’s College, Cambridge; Words and Poetry in 1928.
In this early state copy, there is a comma rather than a period after Leonard’s initial in the imprint.
Provenance: Presented by the author to Edward Playfair (1909-1999), English civil servant, businessman and sometime Chair of the National Gallery Trustees. Ryalnds and Playfair, together with Julian Bell and Anthony Blunt, formed a close circle of friends during their years at King’s College, Cambridge.
Woolmer 269
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