EPOCH AND ARTIST: Selected Writings.

First edition, first printing. Original beige cloth with titles in gilt over red to the spine, in the author designed dustwrapper. A fine copy, the binding square and firm, the cloth clean, the board corners and spine tips with a little very slight wear. The contents are clean throughout and without previous owners' stamps or inscriptions. Complete with the very good, rubbed and creased dustwrapper that is nicked at the spine tips and flap folds with a few short closed tears. Not price-clipped (25s on the front flap).

The first collection of prose writing by the poet and painter David Jones (1895-1974). The writings include essays, reviews, radio broadcasts, letters and periodical articles, and range in subject from Wales and the myths and history of Britain to the philosophy of art and reviews of individual artists. 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.