BEYOND GIVING [with] THE GREEN-SAILED VESSEL

First editions, first printings. Both signed by the author. From the library of Graves' editor at Cassell, Kenneth Parker with a letter from poet to editor loosely laid in. Both were issued in editions of 536 copies, 500 of which were signed and numbered for sale. These copies are unnumbered, out of series copies, both signed by Graves. 1. 'Beyond Giving': Original paper covered boards, in dustwrapper, lettered in black and red. Printed on untrimmed laid paper. A near fine copy, the binding square and firm, the contents clean throughout. The slightly dusty wrapper is marked on the front panel, with a few spots to the spine and folds. 2. 'The Green-Sailed Vessel': Original yellow cloth lettered in gilt to the spine, in dustwrapper, lettered in black and red. Printed on laid paper, untrimmed to lower and fore-edges. A near fine copy, the binding square and firm, the contents clean throughout. The dustwrapper is faded to the lightly spotted spine.

Both volumes are signed by Robert Graves in black ink to the limitation pages. Loosely laid into 'Beyond Giving' is a typed, hand-corrected and signed letter from Graves to his long-term editor at Cassell, Kenneth Parker, by this time retired. Written from Mallorca on the poet's Canelluñ Deya notepaper (dated July 2nd but without the year stated), the curiously nostalgic letter bemoans the current state of publishing in general and of Cassell in particular ("[it is] not what it was in your time and that of yours") before looking much further back: "Today I reach up to my shelf for the 1916 volume which I published entirely by myself – it reminds me of the centre of young writers, Lady Ottoline Morell and her green Garsington. That was where we felt free of publishing publicity – when she was there with a lot of excitement of poets and painters and the war just round the corner. I still hope for a return of handclasps and kisses between publishers and poets." The 1916 self-published volume was probably 'Goliath and David'. The letter is signed off with "best wishes from us both", the other being his wife Beryl (he may also have had one of his younger muses in residence at the time, however). Of 'Beyond Giving', Graves writes in his foreword that "the first part […] is concerned with love. The second contains, among other miscellaneous pieces, 'Troublesome Fame', a self-satire, [...] 'The Sundial's Lament', a throw-back to the jocose early nineteenth-century tradition of my Anglo-Irish family. Also 'Armistice Day 1918', a street-ballad written when I was a twenty-two-year-old infantry captain with a disability pension." His foreword to 'The Green-Sailed Vessel' explains that "Now well into my seventy-sixth year, I am more concerned than ever before with poetic problems akin to those of mathematics and physics", while also noting that the poems' concern "with what may be called the magical powers of thought" and to "mediaeval Irish 'ollamhs' or master-poets […] and their Middle-Eastern Sufic contemporaries, such as Khayaam and Rumi." (Higginson A127, A130).