REMAINS OF ELMET: A Pennine Sequence.

First edition, first printing. Hardcover issue. Publisher's quarter grey cloth over black paper-covered boards lettered in black to the spine, in the photographic dustwrapper. Illustrated with black and white photographs by Fay Godwin throughout. A very near fine copy, the binding square and firm, the contents clean throughout. A touch rubbed to upper and lower edges. Complete with the dustwrapper, lightly rubbed and with a couple of nicks to edges and extremities, with a few light surface marks and a long surface scratch to the rear panel. Not price clipped (£7.95 net to the front flap).

One of 3000 copies of the hardcover issue, published simultaneously with a paperback edition. "The Calder valley, west of Halifax, was the last ditch of Elmet, the last British Celtic kingdom to fall to the Angles", writes Ted Hughes in a brief account of the genesis of this collaborative volume. "For centuries it was considered a more or less uninhabitable wilderness, a notorious refuge for criminals, a hide-out for refugees. Then in the early 1800s it became the cradle for the Industrial Revolution in textiles, and the upper Calder became 'the hardest worked river in England'. Throughout my lifetime, since 1930, I have watched the mills of the region and their attendant chapels die. Within the last fifteen years the end has come. They are now virtually dead, and the population of the valley and the hillsides, so rooted for so long, is changing rapidly. Fay Godwin set out to capture some impressions of this landscape at this moment, and her photographs moved me to write the accompanying poems." (Sagar and Tabor A60b.1)