Franz. The Metamorphosis.

by KAFKA

£2,750 · Offered by Henry Sotheran Ltd

First Edition of Kafka’s Metamorphosis in English KAFKA, Franz. The Metamorphosis. London: [ The Favil Press for ] The Parton Press . 1937 8vo. Publisher’s blue buckram-backed boards with black paper sides, blue printed label to upper board; pp. [vi], [1 (blank)], 74; twentieth-century collector’s bookplate to front pastedown; a very good copy. First complete English translation of Kafka’s Die Verwandlung ( The Metamorphosis ), printed by the publisher of Dylan Thomas’s first book and translated by the influential folklorist Bert Lloyd. The translator, the London-born folk singer, ethnomusicologist, and broadcaster Albert Lancaster Lloyd (also known as Bert Lloyd, 1908-1982), is perhaps best remembered for his instrumental role in popularising British folk music in the 1950s and 1960s; in 1959 he was the co-editor of The Penguin Book of English Folk Songs , with Ralph Vaughan Williams. At the age of sixteen, he went to Australia to work as a shepherd and farmhand, returning to England in the early 1930s, where he worked briefly at the Foyles Foreign Books Department, spent a great deal of time in the British Museum’s reading room, befriended Dylan Thomas and Jack Lindsay, joined the Communist Party, and produced a translation of poems by Lorca. It is perhaps through Thomas that he became connected with David Archer of the Parton Press and bookshop in Red Lion Square in London; the Parton Press had published, in collaboration with the Sunday Referee, Dylan Thomas’s first book,

• Binding: Hardcover

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