Details
STEVENSON, ROBERT LOUIS. Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes. London: C. Kegan Paul 1879. 8vo, original blue-green cloth, decorated and lettered in gilt, stamped in black, endpapers cracked at inner hinges, green half morocco slipcase. FIRST EDITION, one of 750 copies, FIRST ISSUE, frontispiece by Walter Crane, Burn & Co. binder's ticket at rear inside cover. Tipped in: Autograph letter signed (in full) from Stevenson to his close friend Charles Baxter in Edinburgh, Le Monastier, Haute Loire, France, n.d. [accompanying original envelope addressed by Stevenson postmarked 17 September 1878], 1 page, oblong 8vo, right-hand third of letter separated (cutting across words, but nothing missing), regarding Travels with a Donkey: "I shall soon go off on a voyage, for which I think I shall buy a donkey, and out of which, if I do not make a book, may my right hand forget its cunning. I am very busy, writing, sketching, shooting with a revolver...For the first time near a year I feel something like peace..." Beinecke 36.
[With:]
[R.L. STEVENSON]. MEREDITH, GEORGE. Autograph letter signed (in full) TO STEVENSON. Box Hill, Dorking, 17 March 1883. 6 pages, 8vo, tipped in above volume. A fine literary letter: "I dined t'other night with Andrew Lang at the Savile...& met [George] Saintsbury, who talked with me of you, preferring your Modern Western Arabian Tales [New Arabian Nights, 1882] to your choice excursions. For me, the Hansom celerity movement of the former is astonishing...That critic relishes your cleverness more than your genius. Not I. And the best of you seems to me to be the deep well-spring...I have a little volume of verse [Lyrics of the Joy of Earth] I am foolish enough to publish. I have been writing little besides verse for months, and Gower Woodseer [a character in part modelled on Stevenson, in his novel The Amazing Marriage, not published until 1895]...I like to think of your having ambition. The notion of pleasing Shockhead belongs to that sweet power of nourishing illusion which smacks of youth. I have hardly any stirring of the old desire, barely the conception of what it means. But I would not see you lose it, for certainly I was a more diligent worker when I cared for the praises of my countrymen, sometimes counting beforehand what never came..." Letters, ed. C.L. Cline, no. 785 (an excerpt only printed from a 1914 auction catalogue description).
Provenance: Mary Thornton, ownership inscription dated St. Petersburg, 22 September 1879, on half title -- W.T.H. Howe, bookplate -- Edith Barbara Tranter, bookplate. (3)
[With:]
[R.L. STEVENSON]. MEREDITH, GEORGE. Autograph letter signed (in full) TO STEVENSON. Box Hill, Dorking, 17 March 1883. 6 pages, 8vo, tipped in above volume. A fine literary letter: "I dined t'other night with Andrew Lang at the Savile...& met [George] Saintsbury, who talked with me of you, preferring your Modern Western Arabian Tales [New Arabian Nights, 1882] to your choice excursions. For me, the Hansom celerity movement of the former is astonishing...That critic relishes your cleverness more than your genius. Not I. And the best of you seems to me to be the deep well-spring...I have a little volume of verse [Lyrics of the Joy of Earth] I am foolish enough to publish. I have been writing little besides verse for months, and Gower Woodseer [a character in part modelled on Stevenson, in his novel The Amazing Marriage, not published until 1895]...I like to think of your having ambition. The notion of pleasing Shockhead belongs to that sweet power of nourishing illusion which smacks of youth. I have hardly any stirring of the old desire, barely the conception of what it means. But I would not see you lose it, for certainly I was a more diligent worker when I cared for the praises of my countrymen, sometimes counting beforehand what never came..." Letters, ed. C.L. Cline, no. 785 (an excerpt only printed from a 1914 auction catalogue description).
Provenance: Mary Thornton, ownership inscription dated St. Petersburg, 22 September 1879, on half title -- W.T.H. Howe, bookplate -- Edith Barbara Tranter, bookplate. (3)