[WALEY, Arthur]. Chinese Poems. London: Printed by Lowe Bros., 1916. 8°. 16-pages, printed on Japan paper. Stitched into [?]original improvised grey wrappers with Chinese characters in red on the upper wrapper, and the inverted title of the book from which the wrappers were taken (“Etchings and Engravings by Old Masters”) evident on the inside front wrapper, modern box. Provenance: Robert Gathorne-Hardy (signature in pencil on title); “This copy of Waley’s Chinese Poems, 1916, was from the books of Logan Pearsall-Smith. RGH.” (autograph note loosely-inserted). SIGNED BY THE AUTHOR ON THE TITLE. EXCEPTIONALLY RARE. Arthur Waley had privately printed about 50 copies of this, his first book. “Waley was an accurate scholar … and brought a whole civilization into English poetry … Today the poems are as necessary and haunting as ever …” (Cyril Connolly, The Modern Movement). In Madly Singing in the Mountains (1972, p.127), an anthology of Arthur Waley’s writings, Hubert Waley, Arthur’s brother, recalls the genesis of Chinese Poems: “In 1916 [Arthur] distributed to a few dozen friends a booklet containing translations of 52 Chinese poems, which he had had privately printed. The printers supplied the copies unbound and Arthur and I joined forces to bind them in bits of rather florid wall-paper.