THE DYING GAUL. And Other Writings.

First edition, first printing. Original turquoise paper-covered boards with gilt titles to the spine, in dustwrapper. With a black and white frontispiece and two further black and white plates, one showing 'The Dying Gaul', a Roman marble copy of a Greek statue, the other reproducing 'Death and Life-in-Death', a copper engraving by Jones illustrating a scene from Samuel Taylor Coleridge's 'The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner'. A very near fine copy, the binding square and firm, the foot of the spine lightly bumped. The contents are clean throughout and without stamps or inscriptions. Complete with the very good original dustwrapper that is a little rubbed and the edges and lightly toned at the spine. Not price-clipped (£8.50).

A posthumously published collection of essays and prose pieces by the British painter and poet David Jones (1895-1974). Jones was stationed at the front during World War I for two years, one of the longest stretches of any British writer, an experience that left him with post traumatic stress disorder and shaped his literary and visual work for the rest of his life. His lengthy works of poetry and sensitive paintings that grapple with both anxious tension and quiet normalities have evaded the clear definitions of contemporary movements such as modernism or expressionism, standing instead enigmatically alone. While Jones has remained a relatively obscure figure in general culture, his work has been praised as some of the greatest of the 20th century by giants of literature and the arts such as Igor Stravinsky, W. H. Auden and T. S. Eliot, and art historians Kenneth Clark and Herbert Read.