Siegfried Sassoon | Picture Show, Cambridge, 1919, first edition, inscribed by the author to Henry & Ruth Head

Siegfried Sassoon

Picture Show. Cambridge: privately printed for the author by J.B. Peace at the University Press, 1919

FIRST EDITION, ONE OF 200 COPIES, INSCRIBED BY THE AUTHOR, original boards, lacking the plain paper dust-jacket, an excellent copy

Inscribed to Henry & Ruth Head and dated June 7, 1922. Sassoon has also transcribed the first stanza of Thomas Hardy's poem "My spirit will not haunt the mound".

Sir Henry Head was the neurologist who worked with WHR Rivers at Craiglockhart, conducting experiments on his own nervous system. (For a volume inscribed to Rivers, see lot 338). Head met Sassoon at Craiglockhart and became a mentor to the poet especially after the death of Rivers in 1922. Head also wrote a book of WW1 poems entitled Destroyers. This copy of Picture Show was gifted by the Head family to Janet Ashbee in 1941. A letter from Sassoon to Janet, dated 17.7.1947 is laid-in and an original photo of Sassoon is pasted-in. Sassoon has also signed the limitation page and dated the photograph "New York, July 1920". Also laid-in are three clippings of poems by Sigma Sashun (a Sassoon pseudonym), one of which is signed by Sassoon.

LITERATURE

Keynes A19a; Reilly p. 285