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Price:$250.00

John McGahern Signed and Inscribed - Letters of J.B. Yeats 1st/1st

Arrives soon! Get it by Sep 18-23 if you order today
Sep 18-23

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Highlights

Yeats, John Butler. LETTERS OF J.B. YEATS: Letters to His Son W.B. Yeats and Others, 1869–1922. Edited by Joseph Hone. Signed and inscribed with an Introduction by John McGahern. London: Faber and Faber, 1999.

Signed twice by John McGahern. Flat-signed in black ink on the title page beneath his printed name, and additionally inscribed by him on the front free endpaper.

The inscription reads:

For Michael O'Shea
with affection
John McGahern
Foxfield, March 2000

"Now, a most powerful and complex part of the personality is affection and affection springs straight out of the memory."

The quotation is drawn from one of John Butler Yeats's letters in this volume.

Foxfield was McGahern's farm in County Leitrim, where he lived from the 1970s until his death in 2006; the inscription is dated from his home some four months after publication. Joseph Hone — the Yeats family friend and biographer — made the comprehensive 1944 selection of these letters; McGahern abridged it for this edition and contributed the introductory essay. It is his only sustained published engagement with the Yeats family, and the volume in which his own lifelong preoccupation with memory meets John Butler Yeats's. That he chose a line on affection and memory to accompany an inscription written "with affection" is characteristic of him.

Signed McGahern material is uncommon in the trade, and inscribed presentation copies dated from Foxfield are notably scarce. A double-signed association copy.

Condition: Near Fine / Near Fine.

First printing of this abridgement — full number line present including the 1 (2 4 6 8 10 9 7 5 3 1). Octavo. Publisher's boards in the original pictorial dust jacket reproducing a portrait of John Butler Yeats, unclipped with the £25.00 price intact. Eight reproductions of drawings.

The inscription leaf is clean and unmarked, with the ink strong and unfaded, no offsetting to the facing page and no bleed-through to the verso. Binding tight and square; text block clean and unmarked throughout. Jacket bright and unclipped, with only trivial handling wear.

Note on the photographs: the light surface reflection and minor creasing visible in the images is on the archival mylar sleeve, not on the jacket itself. The jacket is the issued Faber wrapper, with the correct printed £25.00 price on the front flap.

The dust jacket is protected in a new archival mylar cover, which is included.

Shipped carefully packed and tracked. Message me with any question about this copy — happy to send additional photographs.

  • Order today to get by Sep 18-23
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  • Ships from: Roswell, GA

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