My Thirty Years' War
London: Knopf, 1930. First UK Edition, First Printing. Hardcover. Octavo. 6.25 x 9.5 in. 274 pp. Occasionally illustrated with black & white reproductions of photographs. Good in original leather boards with scuffing to front panel and rubbing to corners and edges, some off-setting to endpapers with a date penned to head of front endpaper, and two previous owner's bookplates affixed to both front endpapers. Good. Item #9038
Margaret Anderson was an author, literary critic, publisher, and lesbian who began the famous The Little Review in 1914, a fore-runner in progressive politics and boundary-pushing modernist writing from then little-knowns like T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, William Butler Yeats, and Djuna Barnes. The Little Review came under fire in 1921 for serializing James Joyce's Ulysses and Anderson and her partner Jane Heap were sued for obscenity, eventually emigrating to France to escape censor. This memoir, which covers this period of time in her life, is rather scarce in this first UK Knopf edition.
The previous owners' bookplates belonged to Joe Carstairs and C. Ruth Baldwin who were lesbian lovers until Baldwin's early death in 1937. Carstairs, a British-born American speedboat racer, built a church to house Baldwin's ashes on her private island Whale Cay in the Bahamas, though they were eventually reunited after Cartairs death in 1993, at the age of 93, and buried together in Sag Harbor, New York.
Price: $200.00