JONKERS RARE BOOKS
24. For Christmas [Privately printed for the author] Rosaio Press, [1951]. Sole edition. One of 12 copies, unnumbered. Original paper wrappers printed in black and red. Housed within original glassine wrapper. A fine copy, uncut and unopened. [44564] Sold For Christmas, a collection of intensely private love poems written by Greene for his lover, Catherine Walston, whose affair Greene would later fictionalise in The End of the Affair, is the second of two works privately printed for Greene in very small numbers, essentially as a gift to Walston. Greene and Walston met in 1946 as a result of the latter’s conversion to Catholicism, a decision influenced by reading Greene’s novels. The following year they embarked on an affair that would last until the late 1950s and formed a period in Greene’s life which was significant both personally and in his work; “one in which Greene became a major international literary celebrity, the writer of The Heart of the Matter and The End of the Affair who was being considered for the Nobel Prize, a heavyweight Catholic intellec- tual, screenplay writer for a trio of classic films, traveller to and writer about the world’s hotspots” (Wise & Hill). Against this, the affair provoked “a period of great unrest”, as he confessed later in Ways of Escape. The affair also produced an effusion of poetry, written either on notepaper and enclosed among the some 1,200 letters he sent her, or inscribed into a clothbound ‘Black Book’ he bought for Walston. From these, he selected eight poems to print in the first collection, After Two Years, in 1949 and a further seven in For Christmas two years later. In each case he had the book privately printed not- ing the publisher as The Rosaio Press, named for Greene’s villa in Anacapri, a place of escape for Catherine and him. Although a small private distribution was intended, such was the couple’s concern about keeping the affair secret (both Greene and Walston were married), it is unlikely that more than six copies of After Two Years were retained. Greene himself apparently had no recollection of having sent out any copies, beyond a copy each for himself and Walston, and recalls destroying a quantity of copies when the lease at the Anacapri villa expired. Five copies of After Two Years are known to be extant, but Greene’s recollections might be correct as regards For Christmas: besides copies 1 and 2 belonging to Greene and Walston (now in a private collection and Georgetown University respectively), this is the only other copy known. In the late 1970s, Greene’s early bibliographer and biographer Robert Miller wrote to him asking for details of these two books. Greene refused to offer any information in reply, adding they had “never been for sale and are purely private.”
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