HOUSMAN, A. E.

£30,000 · Offered by Peter Harrington · No longer available

A Shropshire Lad. First edition, first impression, first issue, signed by the author on the front free endpaper, "A.E. Housman. 3 Oct. 1918. Cambridge". Signed or inscribed copies of the first edition are rare, with only a handful of copies recorded at auction in the past 50 years, including the famous presentation copy to Moses Jackson (which sold for £48,550 in 2001).There were 500 copies in the first edition of A Shropshire Lad, 250 of which were bound for the first issue. There are four variants of the spine label, with "A" (as here) having priority.Housman perhaps signed this copy for Lady Frances Horner (1854-1940), the hostess and patron of the arts. Horner was a daughter of William Graham, the Scottish politician and one of the principal patrons of the Pre-Raphaelites. Edward Burne-Jones drew and painted her on numerous occasions. Burne-Jones also designed her bookplate, present in this copy. When Laurence Housman published a chapter entitled "Pre-Raphaelitism" in Essays by Divers Hands in 1933 he failed to mention the artist, and A. E. Housman wrote to his brother joking that "I should have liked to be told what to think of Burne-Jones" (Maas, p. 348).Another possibility is David Stuart Horner (1900-1983), the crime fiction writer, partner of Osbert Sitwell, and nephew of Lady Horner. At the time of Housman's signature, Horner was reading History and Modern Languages at Trinity Hall, Cambridge, and Housman was Professor of Latin at Cambridge. Housman was, however, ba

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