Modern Books and Manuscripts
From the Third Programme. A Ten-Year's Anthology. Imagination, Argument, Experience, Exposition. (1956.)
Woodcut vignette to title and four full-page cuts by Biro. An out of series copy from a stated printing of 1300 copies. First edition. Tall 8vo., a very good copy in original grey buckram, spine lettered and banded in gilt, t.e.g., others uncut, marbled card slipcase. London, Nonesuch Press.
Published to celebrate the tenth anniversary of broadcasting by the BBC's Third Programme, and edited by the controller, who writes: "I decided to make a purely personal choice, and to place the emphasis not upon contributions to knowledge ... but upon pleasure". Included are James Kirkup, William Plomer, V.S. Pritchett, Stevie Smith, Graham Greene, Elizabeth Bowen, Bertrand Russell, E.M. Forster, Andre Gide, Edward Sackville-West, T.S. Eliot and Thomas Mann. On Boxing Day, 1954, Max Beerbohm recorded "First Meetings with W.B. Yeats": "I often had the pleasure of meeting Yeats, and I liked him. But merely to like so remarkable, so mystic and intense a creature, to be not utterly under his spell whenever one was in his presence - seemed to argue a lack in oneself and to imply an insult to that presence. Thus the pleasure of meeting Yeats was not for me an unmixed one. I felt always rather uncomfortable, as though I had submitted myself to a mesmerist who somehow didn't mesmerise me. I hoped against hope that I should feel my volition slipping away from me - my cheap little independence fading into a drowsy enchantment where visions would come thronging presently ... Nothing of the sort happened".
Stock Code: MO5734
