JONKERS RARE BOOKS
HIS WIFE’S COPY 5. Lingual Exercises For Advanced Vocabularians Privately printed at the University Press, 1925.
First edition, one of 99 copies. Original brown buckram, spine lettered in gilt. Sassoon’s wife’s copy, inscribed by him on the limitation page “Hester’s Copy, January 1st 1934”. A near fine copy. [41568] £2,000 An excellent association copy and relic of Sassoon’s passionate early relationship with his wife. Sassoon met Hester Gatty on 5th September 1933, and within weeks was composing love letters of the most ardent sort; “I believe that my whole life has been a preparation for the moment when I met you & know, in my soul, that we were made for one another. You, the first woman I have ever loved” (October 1933). The couple married on 18th December 1933, only a couple of months after meeting, and exactly two weeks before this copy was inscribed. Lingual Exercises is a scarce collection of poetry, ostensibly anonymous, but privately published by Sassoon for distribution amongst his friends. The verses, seemingly a reaction to the war and his poems of that period, are both skittish and ironic and sometimes urbane.
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