A <a href="https://www.sothebys.com/en/buy/luxury/books-&amp;-manuscripts/book/first-edition?locale=en" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">first American edition</a>, first printing of Mary Poppins by <a href="https://www.sothebys.com/en/search?query=P.L.+Travers&amp;pfilters.dateRange=past" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">P.L. Travers</a>.<ul><li>P.L. Travers (Australian-British).</li><li>New York: Reynal &amp; Hitchcock, 1934.</li><li>Dust wrapper illustrated by the daughter of E.H. Shepard, Mary, full red topstain to the top edge. </li></ul> The first title in the Mary Poppins series. The books center on the magical English nanny Mary Poppins, who is blown by the East wind to Number 17 Cherry Tree Lane, London, and into the Banks’ household to care for their children. Encounters with pavement-painters and shopkeepers, and various adventures ensue, until Mary Poppins abruptly leaves, i.e., “pops out”. Only the first three of the eight books feature Mary Poppins arriving and leaving. The later five books recount previously unrecorded adventures from her original three visits. As Travers explains in her introduction to Mary Poppins in the Park, “She cannot forever arrive and depart.”

Mary Poppins First American Edition

Books, Manuscripts & Music, from Medieval to Modern

George Leigh Mallory. An important collection of c.145 autograph letters signed, chiefly to his mother with a small number to his father and his sister Mary, dating from his childhood to his final assault on Everest, many letters with envelopes, housed in two adjustable files (labelled "G.L.M. Early letters", containing 5 bundles of letters, and "Everest — 1921-22-24") and in two plastic folders, various sizes, various locations, altogether c.350 pages, 21 September 1895 to 28 May 1924 [with:] Carbon copy typescripts of two detailed letters written to his wife Ruth during the 1924 Everest Expedition, 14 pages [with:] Ruth Mallory, c.7 autograph letters signed, to family members, 1915-24, notably four written in the aftermath of her husband's death, 5 July-26 October 1924 [also with:] 23 vintage photographs, notably 15 vintage prints (mostly copyprints) from the Mount Everest Expeditions of 1921 and 1922 (2 from 1921 and 13 from 1922) mostly with pencil captions on the reverse, the remainder including photographic portraits of Mallory (as a schoolboy, undergraduate, and as a young man) and miscellaneous family photos [also with:] A small number of related items and ephemera including a lecture ticket and an autograph letter signed by Mallory's father to his mother expressing his surprise at news of their son's engagement (“...sly old bachelor – one always thought he was proof against feminine charms!”), 2 pages, 2 May 1914 "...The critical day will perhaps be the one before the last, pushing up the highest camps — provided that goes well Irvine & I should have a very good chance of reaching the top. But it's a long way to go & there are many obstacles. The great thing is that we have a thorough organisation & nothing like discord this time — & for me that I'm strong & fit..." (written from Base Camp, 16 May 1924) A RICHLY DETAILED RECORD OF GEORGE MALLORY’S LIFE FROM BOARDING SCHOOL TO EVEREST, PRESERVED IN HIS LETTERS TO HIS MOTHER. The letters begin with Mallory’s letters home from his prep school and continue through his schooldays at Winchester and undergraduate life at Magdalene College, Cambridge. The early letters talk about sport, friends, family, and his education but gain a unique vitality when Mallory describes his first expeditions to the Alps. He writes with obvious pride about the ways in which climbing has tested his physical endurance, and the letters provide a glimpse of the intensity with which he experienced the sublime landscapes of mountain peaks (“…it was altogether too inexpressibly glorious to see peak after peak touched with the pink glow of its first sun, which slowly spread until the whole top was a flaming fire, & that against a sky with varied tints of leaden blue…”) Mallory became a schoolmaster after coming down from Cambridge, and his early letters from Charterhouse show his continued involvement with the artistic and intellectual interests that he had developed at Magdalene: he writes of sitting for Duncan Grant, for example, and of the reception of his book on Boswell that he had written in Cambridge. On 1 May 1914 he writes to announce his engagement — “What bliss! & What a revolution […] she’s good as gold & brave & true & sweet” — and by the following year he was married with a daughter. By this time, however, World War I had broken out. He gained a commission to the Royal Artillery and was posted to France in May 1916, in time to take part in the Battle of the Somme. His letters from France, like those of other young soldiers writing to their loved ones, carefully underplay the horrors of the Western Front: “…About one day in four or five I visit the trenches for observation work […] One of our guns knocked quite a good lump out of the tower of Pys Church the other day when I was observing & also landed several rounds into the nave. One loses all respect for churches in the enemy’s country! It’s interesting too when one sees Huns through a telescope running along a path or popping into a trench…” (12 October 1916) War changed Mallory, as can be easily seen in these letters. His intellectual appetites remained strong — when he was on leave in Paris shortly after the Armistice he “spent a good deal of time in the Bibliothèque Nationale” (10 December 1918) — but his interest in teaching had dulled. He was drawn to the idealism of the internationalist left, and in early 1921 visited Ireland to report on the War of Independence for the League of Nations Union: in a long letter to his mother after his return to England he writes of his disgust at British policy, especially the excesses of the infamous Black and Tans, and that “the Volunteers are acting from patriotic motives & whatever wrong they may have done is more than balanced by what has been done in our name” (26 January 1921). Beyond anything else, though, there was the lure of the mountains. He hurried to the Alps at the end of term in the summer of 1920 even though his wife Ruth was heavily pregnant (in the event, he missed the birth of his son), and then in February 1921 Sir Francis Younghusband invited him to join the British expedition to Mount Everest. By the time he next wrote to his mother, on 16 April 1921, he was halfway across the Mediterranean on his way to the Himalayas; the Everest expeditions dominate his correspondence from this time until his death more than three years later. Mallory’s letters from the 1921 expedition describe his first impressions of India, the Himalayas, and Everest itself: “…Everest is due south of us. From our camp perched on a shelf under a stony hillside we look straight up the flat narrow glacier to its gigantic northern precipice 7 or 8 miles away It is incredibly big. The summit is between nine & ten thousand feet above the deep cwms – a rock peak plastered with snow, no airy spire, rather a blunted top built on a great arete, a strong head on broad shoulders. It is a terrible formidable mountain: the faces are appallingly steep; sometimes it seems an impossible idea that anyone should ever reach the summit.” (7 July 1921) The expedition was to be dedicated to reconnaissance and Mallory writes in some detail about their painstaking work establishing a possible route up the mountain. The dangers of the expedition were evident throughout and one member, Alexander Kellas, died early in the expedition, but Mallory’s hope to make an attempt on the summit in 1921 was not to be fulfilled. Mallory was only back in England for a few months before the Second Expedition set out for Everest. On 15 May 1922 he wrote to his mother “on the eve of the great adventure”. His next letter, two weeks later, celebrates the “perfect comradeship” of the expedition but admits that “it is not disappointing to be failed at the first attempt; it is rather distressing not to be able to make another”. The great drama of that first attempt, when Mallory saved the lives of three of the expedition by securing the rope on his ice axe when one climber slipped and would have taken all three to certain death, goes unmentioned except to say that the expedition had been “marvellously looked after by providence”. Mallory’s frostbite did not, in the end, prevent him taking part in the final attempt on the summit but the expedition ended in tragedy when seven porters were killed after being swept into a crevasse by an avalanche. Mallory writes to his parents about his guilt at the deaths, concluding that “we knew too little about conditions of snow here” (11 June). In the autumn of 1923 Mallory was pulled from his new life lecturing for Cambridge University when he was asked to join the Third Everest Expedition. He was reluctant to abandon his family (or so he told his mother), but by March 1924 he was once again writing to her as he steamed east toward Bombay. By the end of the month he was in Darjeeling staying at the Mount Everest Hotel, and in early May he was at Base Camp. The current collection also includes several letters from the final expedition to his sister Mary, who was then in Colombo; he even writes on 25 March asking her to cable him when the monsoon begins in Colombo as that will give the expedition a three-week window before the heavy snow comes to Everest. He writes of their plans and preparations, their deliberations about whether to use oxygen, his companions (of Sandy Irvine, who was to die on the mountain with him, he writes on 17 March 1924 that he wishes he had “had a season in the Alps” but that he “has a magnificent body for the job” and is a “very nice fellow” ). Mallory’s final weeks on Everest were gruelling as the weather was hostile compared to previous years, with high winds and fresh snowfall. On 2 May, writing in his tent at Base Camp, he is forced to complete a letter in pencil, apologising to his mother: "sorry the ink has begun to freeze". He also describes how he kept the party’s morale up by collective readings from the anthology The Spirit of Man compiled by Robert Bridges (“…Irvine was rather poetry shy but seemed to be favourably impressed by the Epitaph to Gray’s Elegy…”). Mallory wrote from Base Camp on 16 May about the difficulties they had encountered, just before they pushed on towards the summit. The party reached a height of 7000m (some distance below the heights achieved in 1922), setting up camps along the way, before they were forced to retreat to Camp I on the East Rongbuk Glacier, at an elevation of 5400m. Mallory’s final letters to his mother and Mary were written on 28 May, just days before the final doomed assault: “…It has been a hard time altogether & depressing – but we remain undepressed […] Our plan has to be greatly modified. If I’m fit for the job I shall go up first with Geoffrey Bruce […] it will be a great adventure if we get started before the monsoon hits us – with just a bare outside chance of success & a good many chance of a very bad time indeed. I shall take every care I can you may be sure […] Oxygen is condemned in order to save porters or Irvine & I would have been together…” Mallory and Irvine were last seen alive on 8 June. Their final hours have, of course, been much debated, but they almost certainly died in a snowstorm that afternoon. The current group includes a poignant coda in the form of four letters by Ruth written in the months after her husband’s disappearance: “I could write at first & feel the sublime side now I can only be silent” (5 July 1924). A REMARKABLE SERIES OF LETTERS PROVIDING A COMPLEX AND POWERFUL PORTRAIT OF ONE OF THE GREATEST FIGURES IN THE HISTORY OF MOUNTAINEERING. LITERATURE George Mallory & Tom Newton Dunn. Letters from Everest (London, 2024)

View 1 of Lot 71: George Leigh Mallory |  Series of c.140 letters to his mother and other family members including from Mount Everest, 1895-1924 

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