Books: The Latest Acquisitions

On Going To Church, by George Bernard Shaw, published by the Roycrofters, 1906.
George Bernard Shaw jealously guarded the copyright of his essays and plays and was quick to sue anyone who brought out pirated editions of his works. In 1906, Elbert Hubbard pirated the text to Shaw's essay On Going To Church, making minor changes in the text and issuing the essay as a small book under the Roycroft colophon. Shaw sued over the unauthorized edition and won, forcing Hubbard to re-issue the essay, and pay royalties. This, then, is the unauthorized edition of Shaw's essay and as such is very rare to find. A small quarto, with a white buckram backstrip and brown covered boards. hand-made paper with deckled edges and sown in brown ribbon marker. This is one of those little gems one gets lucky enough to run across once in a while.

Thomas Bird Mosher, A Check List, by Benton Hatch, published by the University of Massachusetts Press, 1966.
Every now and then I would run across a Mosher book with the phrase Hatch 325 in the description. I later learned that this was a reference to a bibliography done up by Benton Hatch and printed by the University of Massachusetts in the mid 60s, a time when acquiring Mosher books was fairly easy and very affordable. So now I have a copy of the book and what a treasure it is! Featuring a lengthy essay on Thomas Bird Mosher and his work in publishing, a complete list of all the books issued by the Mosher Press and facsimiles of title pages. The book itself is done much like a typical book of the Mosher Press: blue paper covered boards, Fabriano paper and Monotype Van Dijk type, slipcased. The prospectus, a replica of Mosher's personal book plate and another small bookplate are included. This edition is number 116 of 500 copies! Thanks to the Check List, I've been able to evaluate my collection, which, I must say, is not bad, and decide where to go next. Invaluable!

The War of the Worlds, by H.G. Wells, illustrated by Edward Gorey, published by the Looking Glass Library (Random House), 1960.
This is one of those rare books all Gorey collectors are on the look-out for. I got quite lucky in the crowded bookstore in Port Townsend by getting stuck right in front of it. As the young lady at the cashier's desk said "It was waiting for you!" This edition still has the dustjacket with a few dings and small tears. Gorey's illustrations compliment the Edwardian apocalyptic story of Earth under attack.

Aphrodite, by Pierre Louys, privately printed, 1919.
I have no idea who had Louys's novel set in ancient Alexandria privately published. This is one of 1500 copies published for "subscribers only." Quite mysterious!

Jefferson And/Or Mussolini, by Ezra Pound, published by Liverright, 1935.
We know Ezra Pound as the Modernist poet who shaped Eliot's The Wasteland and who, in the poem Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, indicted the civilization which brought forth the First World War as "... an old bitch gone in the teeth, ... a botched civilization." Like many of his generation Pound came out of the Great War bitter and cynical and like many he turned to Fascism and Benito Mussolini as the saviour of Western Civilization. In Jefferson And/Or Mussolini, Pound rather persuasively argues that Jeffersonian Democracy and Mussolini's Fascism are similar excercises in nation building through sheer will power. What Pound neglects, though, is that Jefferson never sponsored book burnings and the persecution of intellectuals and personal enemies. Other than that, Pound is more on the mark than off it.

Guide To Kulchur, by Ezra Pound, published by Peter Owen, 1952.
This is an incredibly dense yet readable book, describing Pound's views on Kulchur, as opposed to stale, stagnant Culture, a forward-looking, progressive, active state of being. Ranging from the Confuscian Analects to Modernist poets and covering all bases in between in a journalistic, aphoristic style, terse, lively and thought provoking.