[Conrad, Joseph]--Kipling, Rudyard

8vo, fourth edition, from the library of Joseph Conrad with his ownership signature ("Joseph Conrad") on front free endpaper, 40pp. publisher's catalogue at end, original red buckram stamped in gilt on spine, top edge gilt, some browning, spine faded, bumped at extremities

Christies, 7 June 2005, lot 143

Conrad visited Kipling in August 1904 and sent him an inscribed copy of The Mirror of the Sea a couple of years later. Kipling claimed that the secret of Conrad's appeal to the English was, in the view of Knowles and Moore, "through his very strangeness and foreignness".

Writing to R.B. Cunninghame Graham in 1897, Conrad noted that "Mr Kipling has the wisdom of the passing generations - and holds it in perfect sincerity. Some of his work is of impeccable form and because of that little thing he shall sojourn in Hell only a very short while. He squints with the rest of his excellent sort. It is a beautiful squint; it is an useful squint. And - after all - perhaps he sees around the corner?" (Collected Letters, I, pp.369-70).