SOME LIMERICKS. Collected for the use of Students and ensplendourd'd with Introduction, Geographical Index, and with Notes Explanatory and Critical by Norman Douglas.

Douglas (Norman)

Published by Florence: privately printed at the Tipografia Giuntina, 1928

About this Item

FIRST EDITION, 96/100 COPIES (from an edition of 110 copies) signed by the author, one or two pages with pencil cross at head, pp. 97, royal 8vo, original golden-yellow canvas lettered in red to upper board, perhaps a hint of fading to the backstrip, the top edge slightly dusty, others untrimmed, bookplate of Dennis Wheatley to front pastedown (a Frank C. Papé design), very good. Douglas's work is a scholarly one, though not in a way that seeks to obscure or bury the nature of its text through erudition; it was, he considered, 'one of the filthiest books in the English language, written for the Dirty Minded Elect'. The provenance of this copy is appealing, deriving from Dennis Wheatley's library (sold by Blackwell's in 1979); both its text and illustration - with Wheatley's mentor, Gordon Eric Gordon-Tombe, as a satyr, instructing his charge, as a naked youth, to taste all of life, resonate with Douglas's work. Wheatley is known to have composed his own limericks, of a similarly lubricious hue, in the trenches of the First World War. (Woolf A27a).

Seller Inventory # 79649

Bibliographic Details

• Title: SOME LIMERICKS. Collected for the use of Students and ensplendourd'd with Introduction, Geographical Index, and with Notes Explanatory and Critical by Norman Douglas.
• Publisher: Florence: privately printed at the Tipografia Giuntina
• Publication Date: 1928
• Seller catalogs:
  • Modern First Editions