THE SHADOW OF A TITAN

First edition, first printing. Inscribed presentation copy of the author's only novel. Publisher's original green cloth with gilt titles to the upper board and spine. A very good or better copy, the binding square and firm with some rubbing to the corners and the edges of the slightly toned spine. The contents, with toning to the endpapers are otherwise clean throughout and without previous owner's inscriptions or stamps.

Inscribed by A. F. Wedgwood in black ink on the half title "To my dear uncle from / the author / 27.5.'10". The recipient is likely Laurence Wedgwood (1844 – 1913), a director of the Wedgwood pottery firm. The author, a keen mountaineer and Captain in the British Army was killed in active service during the First World War (March 1917). An adventure novel, the main protagonist of which is "Maurice Noonan", a Cambridge undergraduate, who is the heir of his uncle "Major Tom Waring", a retired British Army officer and minor landowner from Staffordshire. The action ranges from the Staffordshire Moorlands to the deep interior of "Bolumbia", a fictional South American country, where Maurice must overcome Bolumbia's dictator (The eponymous Titan) "Almirante don Eustauio Etrada de la Camara". Contemporary reviews were favourable, 'The Observer' describing The Shadow of a Titan as "a masterpiece on a South American dictatorship which [George] Meredith might have fathered". (New Novels, The Observer, 26 June 1910).