126
126 ROWLING, J. K. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. London: Bloomsbury, 1999 Octavo. Original pictorial boards. With the dust jacket. Tiny mark to fore edge, else a fine copy in the jacket with hint of sunning to spine. first edition, sixth impression, inscribed by the author on the dedication page, “To Susan, with lots of love Jo x JK Rowl- ing”. A superb association: the recipient, Susan Sladden, was a close friend of Rowling’s in Edinburgh who enabled her to finish the Philosopher’s Stone by babysitting her daughter Jessica; Rowling later dedicated Goblet of Fire to her. After her divorce, Rowling had returned to the UK with her daughter and three chapters of Harry Potter , and decided to give her writing one serious try, thinking she might never again have the opportunity. She moved to Edinburgh to be near her sister and attended a local Church of Scotland congre- gation, where she met Susan Sladden. An elderly woman who had never married, “we were not ‘dead certs’ for friendship” Rowling recalled, but Sladden became an invaluable friend to her. Rowling was new to the city, and had no friends and no-one to look after her daughter: her sister worked full-time, her mother had died several years previously, and she was ineligible for state-funded childcare. “The elderly woman would take care of Jessica for an afternoon and encourage Rowling to get out a little, kick up her heels, see an art show, do some window shopping. Instead, Rowling would find an empty table at a coffee shop and work on Harry Potter” (Weeks). provenance: from Sladden to her neighbours who helped care for her. In a nice piece of synchronicity, it is interesting to note that Sladden’s house number was four. Weeks, Linton, “Charmed, I’m Sure: The Enchanting Success Story of Harry Pot- ter’s Creator, J. K. Rowling”, Washington Post , 20 October 1999. £7,500 [128863]
127
127 SACKVILLE-WEST, Vita. “Andrew Marvell”, original manuscript. 1929 47 leaves, quarto (285 × 222 mm), complete, written on one side of the paper only in blue ink, with proposed footnotes in red. Original folding buff paper wrapper, holograph title on front. Housed in a modern folding case. Compositor’s marks, dated at end “Finished June 7 in 1929”. The manuscript evidently composed in a notebook and subsequently carefully disbound (traces of blue paper and glue to inner edges), a little marginal browning, condition excellent. the complete original autograph manuscript used as the printer’s setting copy for Sackville-West’s essay on Marvell, the most substantial of her original manuscripts remaining on the mar- ket. Aside from a few short stories and a few ephemeral pieces pre- viously disposed of (mostly for charity), the bulk of Sackville-West’s literary archive was offered for public sale at auction by Sotheby’s (10 July 2003). It went unsold at the auction but afterwards was split into two groups and sold by private treaty: the manuscripts of her novels went to a private collector, and the remainder to Yale. The compositor’s mark notes that the present manuscript was fin- ished 7 June 1929. It was published three months later on 27 Septem- ber as the first monograph in T. S. Eliot’s projected series with Faber, “The Poets on the Poets”. Sackville-West makes it clear on the first page that she intends to deal with only one aspect of the writer: “The subject of this essay is the Andrew Marvell who wrote poetry; the po- litical and theological aspects of his life, and the expression which they found in his satires, his pamphlets, and his letters, will scarcely be touched upon at all. I offer no excuse for this omission. It is purely as a poet that I would consider him.” Within these limits, the mono- graph, finished less than a year before she and Harold Nicolson pur- chased Sissinghurst Castle, exhibits a natural congruence between
66
Peter Harrington 151
Made with FlippingBook - professional solution for displaying marketing and sales documents online