INSCRIBED WITH AN ALS 2. Lingual Exercises For Advanced Vocabularians With An Autograph Letter Signed [SASSOON, Siegfried] Privately printed at the University Press, 1925. First edition, one of 99 copies. Original brown buckram, spine lettered in gilt. Inscribed by Sassoon for Marjorie Forster, and signed with his monogram. With: A single-page autograph letter from Sassoon to Forster, dated April 24th [1925]: “My dear Marjorie, I heard that you were abroad, but am sending my new book to greet you on your return. I hope you will find a few things in it to give you plea - sure & remind you of your old friend (who has thought of you many times lately but felt unable to write to you). If any of my poems are any good they are the best consolation that I can offer my friends. And life is full of troubles, isn’t it - for all of us? Yrs ever, SS.” [41805] £1,750 A fine association copy, with an accompanying letter, inscribed for his childhood friend Mar - jorie Forster.
Lingual Exercises is a scarce collection of poetry, ostensibly anonymous, but privately published by Sassoon for distribution amongst his friends. Writing later to his publisher about including some verses from this work in a collection, Sassoon states, “I have done with verbal gymnastics in the future. Being smart don’t suit me, really. But it was a phase that had to be worked out...”
“FROM HIS OLD FRIEND”
3. Sherston’s Progress SASSOON, Siegfried
Faber & Faber, 1936. First edition. Publisher’s blue cloth, lettered gilt, in the blue printed dustwrapper. Inscribed by Sassoon on the half-title, “H. F. Thompson. From his very (and affectionate) old friend Siegfried Sassoon. Heytesbury. Dec. 16. 1936.” A very good copy in a very good dustwrapper, some toning and wear to spine. [41573] £1,250 An excellent association copy. H. F. Thompson was a childhood friend of Sassoon’s, whom he met at Henley House. Sassoon much pre - ferred Henley House to Marlborough, as Egremont notes in his biography of Sassoon: “In this gentler place Sassoon made greater friends than at Marlborough: Henry Thompson from Cumberland, again a golfer with a ‘delightful cronyish quality’.” Later, when Sassoon was wrestling with his first volume of autobiography, Memoirs Of A Fox-Hunting Man , he dined with Thompson. Egremont notes that “On 21 November [1926] he could not work, an accumulation of insomnia and low spirits, then after dinner with H. F. Thompson, a childhood friend, talk about the memoirs led to another 500 words”.
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