THE SLEEPING LORD AND OTHER FRAGMENTS

First edition. Signed by the author. Limited edition. Publisher's original beige buckram over bevelled boards, titles stamped in blind to the upper board and in gilt over black to the spine. Top edge brown. In the brown cloth slipcase. Frontispiece and one further full page illustration by David Jones. A near fine copy, the binding square and tight, bright and fresh with some faint toning to the spine. The contents are clean throughout and without previous owners' marks. Housed in the lightly rubbed and faded, structurally sound slipcase.

Issued in a limited edition of 150 copies, this example is numbered 26 and signed by David Jones in black ink on the limitation page. The last work published by the painter and poet David Jones in his lifetime, 'The Sleeping Lord' continues the exploration of the themes of war and religion begun by its predecessors 'In Parenthesis' and 'The Anathemata'. During World War One Jones was stationed at the front 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.