Labels. A Mediterranean Journal.

With a page of the holograph manuscript tipped in.

First edition. Large 8vo., original blue cloth, t.e.g., decorated endpapers. London, Duckworth.

Number 49 of 110 numbered copies signed by the author, with a page of the original holograph manuscript tipped-in. Spine slightly faded and marked, and with some variable browning to the upper and lower covers, otherwise an excellent copy.

Labels is Waugh's first travel book, the fruit of a difficult season in the Mediterranean for the recently married Waughs, especially since She-Evelyn fell seriously ill with pneumonia and was on the point of death in Port Said. As Martin Stannard writes, with characteristic understatement: "Some of the romantic enthusiasm which had led her into an impetuous marriage had inevitably died during that trip" and within a couple of months of their return she had fallen in love with John Heygate and the marriage was effectively over. Waugh wrote her out of the text under her own identity, instead turning themselves into a fictional couple called Geoffrey and Juliet, and the American edition was published as A Bachelor Abroad. The book is largely a pot-boiler travelogue but is not without moments of genius: the chapter on the cultural history of sunrise in Paul Fussell's The Great War and Modern Memory quotes Waugh on "... the sight of Etna at sunset; the mountain almost invisible in a blur of pastel grey, glowing on the top and then repeating its shape, as though reflected, in a wisp of grey smoke, with the whole horizon behind radiant with pink light, fading gently into a grey pastel sky. Nothing I have ever seen in Art or Nature was quite so revolting."

The special copies were issued with a leaf of Waugh's manuscript to increase their collectability, and the present copy has the amusing and very Waughvian episode where a "beautiful and splendidly dressed Englishwoman" launches wave after wave of flattery upon him, flattery that of course was aimed at his elder brother Alec.

"Then she said to me, "You know, I am psychic. The moment I came into this room to-night I knew that there was a great personality here, and I knew that I should find him before the evening was over." I suppose that real novelists get used to this kind of thing. It was new to me and very nice. I had only written two very dim books and still regarded myself less as a writer than an out-of-work private schoolmaster."

Stock Code: 224021