POEMS

New revised edition. With an autograph note on card, signed by the author, loosely laid in. Historical novelist Mary Renault's copy. Publisher's original blue-green cloth, decorated in gilt (after a design by Althea Gyles), and with titles in gilt to the spine. Two prefaces by Yeats, one dated January 1927, the other (a preface to the seventh edition) is dated 1912. A near very good copy, the binding square and firm with rubbing and bumping to the edges, the cloth chipped with some loss at the spine tips. The contents, with the signed bookplate of Mary Challans to the front pastedown, and some spotting to the prelims, are otherwise clean throughout.

Loosely laid into this copy is a small card inscribed by the author in black ink "Please reserve for July 22 [crossed out] 24 / W. B. Yeats". The significance of the note, and the circumstances under which it was inserted, are unknown to this cataloguer. The book bears the ownership bookplate of Mary Challans, (later the acclaimed author of historical fiction Mary Renault) dating from her time as a student at St Hugh's College, Oxford, where one of her tutors and early influences was J. R. R. Tolkien. The volume remained in her library, in its present state, until her death in Cape Town in 1983, after which it passed to her life-partner and literary executor, Julie Mullard. (Wade 153).