ELIOT, T. S.

£8,500 · Offered by Peter Harrington · No longer available

The Waste Land. First edition in book form, number 724 of 1,000 copies, complete with the dust jacket, of arguably the most significant English-language poem of the 20th century.Negotiations for the publication began in January 1922 and continued into late summer. During a visit to Paris, Horace Liveright of Boni & Liveright met Ezra Pound several times and, at a dinner on 3 January with Pound, T. S. Eliot, and James Joyce, made offers for The Waste Land, Ulysses, and Pound's work. Eliot secured a 15 per cent royalty for a projected autumn book publication, though Liveright worried the poem was too short.The poem first appeared in Britain in the October issue of The Criterion and in the United States in the November issue of The Dial. Eliot received $150 and The Dial's second annual award for distinguished service to letters, worth $2,000. Boni & Liveright agreed that The Dial would have first US publication in return for purchasing 350 copies of the book at a discount. The book appeared in New York in December 1922 in an initial run of 1,000 copies; it was the first printing to include Eliot's notes, added in part to extend the work. The edition was issued in two batches: the first 500 copies in a flexible binding with stamped numbers in the colophon 5 mm high; the second 500, as here, in stiff cloth with the colophon numbers 2 mm high.Laid into this copy is a 4-page advertisement leaflet for the publisher's "Modern Library" series, listing 104 previously published titles an

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