DYLAN THOMAS AT
ASH RARE BOOKS
43 HURON ROAD
LONDON SW17 8RE
UNITED KINGDOM

London : The Sunday Referee and The Parton Bookshop, (1934). First edition : just 500 copies were printed, this copy being one of the second batch of 250 to be bound, with an additional inserted leaf bearing [February 1936] advertisements. The most remarkable debut in all twentieth-century English-language poetry – written before and published just weeks after Thomas’s twentieth birthday and already containing several of his greatest poems – “I See the Boys of Summer in Their Ruin”, “The Force that Through the Green Fuse Drives the Flower”, “Where Once the Waters of Your Face”, etc.
Demy 8vo (23cm). [2],[ii],[3]-36,[iv]pp. Original black cloth with rounded back, lettered up spine in Dutch gilt; very slightly rubbed and a touch dulled; some spotting to endpapers and outer leaves, but a good and sound copy in the rare original dust-jacket – the jacket also with a sprinkling of spots, but barring a couple of short nicks and a slight crease, in very good state. A loosely inserted press-cutting of a 1953 obituary notice remarks that the book’s “impact was immediate and profound ... this poet had created an idiom ... he had disturbed the roots of our language”.

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London : J. M. Dent & Sons, (1954). First edition. A collection of the radio scripts – stunning in their use of language. Twelve are personal – reminiscences of childhood, memories of Christmas, quite the best account of the Festival of Britain ever written, etc. – and ten further broadcast essays: Dylan Thomas on Wilfred Owen, on Welsh poets, on De La Mare, on Sir Philip Sidney, on reading poetry, and on poetry itself. With a perceptive introduction by Aneirin Talfan Davies on “the deliberate skill of the craftsman who weighed every word and every syllable”.
Crown 8vo (20cm). x,(182)pp. Portrait frontispiece. Original blue cloth, lettered in gilt; a sprinkling of edge-spots, but a very good, bright and sharp copy in the dust-jacket – the jacket with a hint of rubbing, but also very good. Rolph B23.

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