CROWDER, Henry.

£12,500 · Offered by Peter Harrington · No longer available

Henry Music. First edition, presentation copy, inscribed by the author incorporating the printed limitation, "[This is No.] is for Dr. Armando Child, Henry Crowder. First copy in token of first audition in his home. London, Dec. 8. 1930". This edition was limited to only 100 copies numbered and signed by Crowder.It is accompanied by a two-page autograph letter signed by Harold Acton - one of the contributors - to the bookseller John Bell, explaining the association. Child was "a genial and sociable doctor" whose patients included Radclyffe Hall, Edith Sitwell and her brother Osbert, the journalist and criminologist F. Tennyson Jesse, and the actress Vivien Leigh. Acton notes that "most of his friends were also patients, including Nancy Cunard". "I remember him as a kindly, humorous man who had some connection with Alexander Dumas?... evidently Crowder played his music at one of Dr Child's parties, but I was not among his guests". The Hours Press was Nancy Cunard's small but important venture. In 1930 she moved the press to Paris, and that summer she and Crowder travelled to Creysse in the south of France. She had persuaded him to set his choice of poems to music for this book. Acton, Richard Aldington, and Walter Lowenfels were happy for Crowder to choose from their poems. Samuel Beckett - whose first book, Whoroscope, Crowder had helped print at the Hours Press that same year - wrote "From the Only Poet to a Shining Whore (for Harry Crowder to Sing") specifically for this pu

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