Lot 243
  • 243

# - Lawrence, T.E.

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Description

  • [Seven Pillars of Wisdom. A triumph. 1919-1920. Oxford Times for the Author, 1922]
single page, 282 x 218mm, headed "Chapter   ", text beginning "Our march lay back the way we had come, down Wadi-Safra, until opposite Kharma, where we turned to the right up the side valley...", preserved in transparent folder, note by Colonel Bradfer-Lawrence loosely inserted 

Catalogue Note

a page from the rare oxford edition of "seven pillars".

The manuscript of most, if not all, of Lawrence's first effort at writing Seven Pillars of Wisdom was lost at Reading Railway Station late in 1919. The second version, written in London in 1919-20 during a period of three months, was burned by the author in Chingford in 1922. The third manuscript was written in London, Jeddah and Amman during 1921 and 1922. It was a version of this "text three" which Lawrence had set up in linotype by the compositors at the Oxford Times between January and June 1922. "Eight sets of the unnumbered chapters were printed on a proofing press. Afterwards, Lawrence assembled the chapters in their correct order and numbered them by hand..." (Jeremy Wilson, T.E. Lawrence. Lawrence of Arabia. National Portrait Gallery Exhibition Catalogue, 1988). Eight copies were bound and --though the author often spoke of destroying them--six survive: two in the British Library, one in the Bodleian, one at Harvard and two in private collections. The present fragment is from the two remaining sets of pages which were "used and largely discarded during production of the 1926 subscribers' edition" (op.cit.)