Lustra.

£2,500 · Offered by Maggs Bros Ltd

With a fine bold presentation inscription from the author on the front free endpaper “a Victor / companions in misfortune / E.P.” The recipient is presumably Victor Plarr. Born in Strasbourg, educated in Edinburgh, he was a member of the Rhymers’ Club with Dowson, Yeats and Johnson. He was a member of Pound’s circle when he first arrived in London, and Pound was a regular visitor to his Sunday evening at-homes. They both wrote poems about each other, Pound famously describing Plarr’s reminiscence of fin de siècle literary life in London in Hugh Selwyn Mauberley: Among the pickled foetuses and bottled bones, Engaged in perfecting the catalogue, I found the last scion of the Senatorial families of Strasbourg, Monsieur Verog. For two hours he talked of Gallifet; Of Dowson; of the Rhymers’ Club; Told me how Johnson (Lionel) died By falling from a high stool in a pub … But showed no trace of alcohol At the autopsy, privately performed - Tissue preserved - the pure mind Arose toward Newman as the whiskey warmed. Dowson found harlots cheaper than hotels; Headlam for uplift; Image impartially imbued With raptures for Bacchus, Terpsichore and the Church. So spoke the author of “The Dorian Mood.” M. Verog, out of step with the decade, Detached from his contemporaries, Neglected by the young, Because of these reveries. What is less well known is the very bad-tempered poem Plarr wrote out on the endpaper of his copy of Pound’s A Quinzaine for this Yule, formerly in the Alan Clodd collect

• Year: 1917

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