POUND, EZRA | Hugh Selwyn Mauberley. [London:] The Ovid Press, 1920

The Property of a Gentleman

POUND, EZRA

Hugh Selwyn Mauberley. [London:] The Ovid Press, 1920

Gathered signatures, never bound (9 3/4 x 6 1/8 in.; 247 x 155 mm, uncut). Title-device, decorative initials and colophon device by Edward Wadsworth; some minor soiling. Beige buckram clamshell case, brown morocco gilt lettering-pieces.

First edition. Copy 159 of 200 numbered copies printed for John Rodker. Important presentation copy, inscribed by Ezra Pound to Schofield [sic] Thayer and dated "1920".

This copy of Mauberley is an excellent association copy: there is a strong likelihood that this particular copy was the text source for the first printing of any portion of the book in America, in the September 1920 issue of Scofield Thayer's and J. S. Watson's periodical The Dial (Gallup C596). Pound connected with Thayer and Watson in March 1920, the month before this book was completed, and contributed his own work, correspondence and translations to The Dial at frequent intervals over the following decade. It was also at Pound's instigation that Eliot's The Waste Land appeared in America for the first time in The Dial's pages.

An important copy of one of the seminal worth of 20th-century poetry, accompanied by Thayer's own annotated copy of the September 1920 issue of The Dial, wherein the first six poems from section I appear.

REFERENCE:

Connolly, Modern Movement 35b; Gallup A19

PROVENANCE:

Scofield Thayer (presentation inscription; sold Sotheby's New York, 18 June 1987, lot 163)