327. Sassoon (Siegfried) Rhymed Ruminations, first edition, one of 3 copies printed for Hester Sassoon and Geoffrey Keynes, this inscribed to Hester Sassoon from Keynes, Sept. 1939, printed in red throughout, title by Laurence Whistler, colophon device, handsomely bound in original full brown morocco by Gray of Cambridge, with single-roll gilt borders and decorative corner-flourishes on covers, each cover with gilt central lyre device, titled in gilt on spine and with gilt floral dentelles, g.e., [Keynes p.102], small 8vo, at the Chiswick Press, 1939.
est. £1500 – £2000
An excellent copy of this key work in Sassoon’s canon, both in terms of condition and association. Several of the thirty-three poems present ominously anticipate the encroaching Second World War. The lyre, presumably a reference to the lyre of Orpheus, could possibly be a nod to Sassoon’s pseudonym ‘Pinchbeck Lyre’, which he adopted to parody Humbert Wolfe in 1931.