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41. CHISWICK PRESS. JONES, Henry Arthur. Whitewashing Julia. An Original Comedy in Three Acts. Privately Printed not for circulation at the Chiswick Press. 1903.
£500
8vo., sometime finely bound in full red morocco, boards with single gilt line panel and corner star tools, spine lettered and panelled in gilt, lower board with gilt bee tool, all edges gilt, marbled endpapers. A very good copy.
First edition. Inscribed by Jones to Edith Evans “Dear Miss Edith Evans, With great admiration for your splendid gifts, and hoping they may continue to meet with recognition from playgoers and critics, I am cordially yours, Henry Arthur Jones Sept 26th ‘27. These privately printed old Chiswick Plays are beginning to be valued by the booksellers on account of the fine printing, no longer now to be obtained in an age when Democracy is coming into its own, to the great discomfort of us all”.
From the library of Edith Evans’s biographer, the film director and actor Bryan Forbes with his bookplate.
Henry Arthur Jones may best be remembered for the description of his writing by Oscar Wilde, “There are three rules for writing plays. The first rule is not to write like Henry Arthur Jones; the second and third rules are the same.” He was nonetheless a successful playwright with a long line of plays and comedies, ranging in type from the phenomenally popular melodrama, “The Silver King,” through the tense drama of “Mrs. Dane’s Defense,” the beautiful and moving tragedy of “Michael and His Lost Angel,” and the idealistic “The Divine Gift,” to the high and sophisticated comedy, “The Liars.”
In the 1920s he began to write political essays and engaged in attacks on both Bernard Shaw and H.G. Wells. The inscription in this book gives a keen insight into his political standpoint, but it is somewhat curious in the context of the fulsome and complimentary inscription to Edith Evans who had created leading roles for many of Bernard Shaw’s plays.
42. CHISWICK PRESS. PATER. Odds and Ends in Prose and Verse. Privately Printed at the Chiswick Press 1908.
£750
4to., finely bound in full dark blue morocco, boards with single gilt line panel enclosing a double gilt line border with elaborate corner pieces, spine lettered in gilt with richly gilt panels, all edges gilt, turn-ins with elaborate floriate tools over green silk endpapers. Portrait frontispiece, decorative head and tail pieces and initials. A fine copy of a handsomely printed book.
Limited presumably to only a few copies for his family, handsomely printed at the Chiswick Press. “My idea or reason for compiling and publishing this unimportant book is that I may present to my children and grandchildren a memento in such a form that, when my time shall come, I may be kindly remembered by them”.
The anonymous “Pater” covers an eclectic range of subjects: An imitation of Macaulay’s Lays of Ancient Rome The Fate of Curtius; an imitation of a Byronic Canto Ida; an essay The Modern Education of Women, which was original published in the Observer in October 1873 “written at a time when much was written on the subject”, and signed “A Parent of Daughters”; a sketch entitled A Dream by One who Dreamt It “at a time the Jews in Russia were terribly maltreated and when the Dreyfus affair was causing much trouble in France”, presaging the creation of a Jewish state, “A beautiful land of very vast extent was now their country. Hated and envy of the race had caused a universal exodus of the Jews from all the civilized countries of Europe…”; five poems “written in extreme youth”; and a duologue of music hall patter.
With the bookplate of Bernard A Isaac, depicting a desert scene. From this bookplate and the interesting Sketch foreseeing an independent Jewish state, we presume that “Pater” was a successful Jewish family man. Sadly we have not been able to discover more about him.
43. CHISWICK PRESS. MANHOOD, H.A. Little Peter the Great. Joiner & Steele, Ltd 1931.
£98
8vo. Original yellow buckram, lettered in gilt on spine and upper board. Frontispiece mounted at large and tailpiece by Rowland Hilder. A very good copy.
First edition, limited edition of 550 copies signed by the author. One of the Furnival Book series. With a foreword by Henry Williamson.
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