ALL WHAT JAZZ: A Record Diary.

First edition, first printing. Publisher's original tan cloth with gilt titles to the spine, in the dustwrapper showing Alan Marshall's photographic portrait of Larkin. A near fine copy, the binding square and firm, the cloth bright and fresh but with some ghosting of he dustwrapper design on the spine. The contents, with a little spotting to the endpapers and closed text block edge, a couple of light foxing spots to the endpapers, and a small production fault or paper flaw to the lower-right corner of pp. 197-201, are otherwise clean throughout, and without previous owners' inscriptions or stamps. Complete with the lightly rubbed dustwrapper, that is a little toned to the top edge, and otherwise bright and without loss or tears. Not price-clipped (35s / £1.75 net to the front flap).

Although he was persistently self-deprecating about their quality, and his qualifications to write them, Larkin was fond his occasional Jazz writings. "I have rescued these articles from their press-cuttings book", he writes in the substantial introduction to 'All What Jazz', "because for all their slightness and superficiality they contain occasional sentences that still amuse me or seem justified". Clive James goes as far as to assert that "[a] good part of the secret of what Larkin really thinks about art is distributed through the pages of All What Jazz, and if you want to take the weight of [his] aesthetic intelligence, it is to that collection you must go." [31] When, two decades later, Larkin reprinted the introduction in Required Writing (1983), he noted that it was the only piece "written on my own initiative", the others having been commissioned. He concedes that the introduction's contention "that post-[Charlie] Parker jazz is the jazz equivalent of modernist developments in other arts" may not be "wholly defensible", (PL intro in JB 330), that its anti-modernist posture may have more to do with nostalgia than any deeply held aesthetic principles. "[T]he worst offence committed by Miles Davis or John Coltrane", James Booth suggests, was "that their records didn't sound like the records he had grown up with and loved." Larkin acknowledges as much when he asks Anthony Thwaite to "imagine a book by Humphrey Lyttelton saying that modern poetry is no good, while at the same time charmingly admitting he's never read any since 1940, and you will get some idea of […] mine […]". The first edition was published 9 February 1970 in an edition of 4,000 copies. (Bloomfield A8(a)).