GREENE, Graham (1904-1991). Babbling April. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1925. 8°. Original grey paper boards, printed in blue, dust-jacket (dust-jacket darkened at backstrip). Printed at the Shakespeare Head Press. With newspaper profile of the author laid in.

No VAT on hammer price or buyer's premium.

GRAHAM GREENE (1904-91) Graham Greene published his first book while still an undergraduate at Balliol. He became a Roman Catholic the following year and worked on The Times for four years until good reviews of The Man Within (1929) encouraged him to become a full-time writer. Ottoline Morrell invited him and his wife Vivienne to tea the following autumn (a photograph of the three of them, together with Basil de Selincourt, is in the National Portrait Gallery). They continued to correspond, and he sent her books - including It's a Battlefield, in which she could find elements of herself - but Greene, with his rather cold eye, was never one of her enthusiastic acolytes.

Details

GREENE, Graham (1904-1991). Babbling April. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1925. 8°. Original grey paper boards, printed in blue, dust-jacket (dust-jacket darkened at backstrip). Printed at the Shakespeare Head Press. With newspaper profile of the author laid in.

FIRST EDITION OF THE AUTHOR'S FIRST BOOK AND ONLY BOOK OF VERSE, PRECEDING HIS FIRST NOVEL BY FOUR YEARS. PRESENTATION COPY, inscribed 'Lady Ottoline Morrell from Graham Greene October 23 1930'. Impressed by Greene's novel The Man Within, Morrell invited him and his wife, Vivienne, to tea at 10 Gower Street in the autumn of 1930 (Seymour, p.409). The Greenes signed the visitors book at 10 Gower Street on 23rd October 1930, the date of the inscription in this book. Wobbe A1.

Special notice

No VAT on hammer price or buyer's premium.

More from Modern First Editions including Books from the Library of Lady Ottoline Morrell and Family

View All