Hugh. Sangschaw.

by MACDIARMID

£1,000 · Offered by Henry Sotheran Ltd

With an Autograph Letter to the ‘Best-Hated Man in Scotland’ MACDIARMID, Hugh. Sangschaw. Edinburgh and London: William Blackwood Sons Limited . 1925. 8vo. Publisher’s dark blue boards, gilt vignette to upper board, spine and upper board let-tered in gilt, in the publisher’s pale blue printed dustwrapper; pp. xii, 58, [4 (testimonials)], [2 (colophon, blank)]; jacket faded, spine sunned, spine ends lightly bumped, a few small chips to jacket at head of spine; light toning; else a very good copy; front free endpaper signed ‘C. M. Grieve (“Hugh M’Diarmid”), contemporary ownership inscription of G. M. Thomson. First edition of MacDiarmid’s pioneering volume of verse in ‘synthetic Scots’, signed by the poet using his given name and his pen name, with a seemingly unpublished autograph letter from the author (signed ‘Christopher Grieve’) to the journalist George Malcolm Thompson (1848–1933), a portrait photograph of MacDiarmid, and an invitation to his seventieth birthday party. Thomson was co-founder in 1922 of the Porpoise Press, with Roderick Watson Kerr and John Gould, MacDiarmid’s successors as editors of the Broughton Magazine (1910–11). He had written of MacDiarmid that ‘he has done more than anyone else to put Scotland on the map’ (quoted in McKechnie, p. 137). The year after the publication of Sangschaw , he and MacDiarmid became embroiled in a curious publishing triangle. In a letter to George Ogilvie, his former English teacher, dated 1 January 1928, MacDiarmid writes: ‘

• Binding: Hardcover

Found via Rare Books Intel, a search across rare-book dealers, auction houses and marketplaces worldwide.