Soma [Literary Magazine]: [Number Two]

LIMITED EDITION, no. 96/ 350. Slim crown 8vo, pp. [88] + frontispiece by Cecil Wray and illustration by Frederick Carter. Yellow buckram, spine lettered in silver, silver-stamped crescent moon to upper board. Top edge silver, leading edge untrimmed. Grubby boards (patchily so cleaning attempted?), dusty edges. Frontispiece loose, else, internally clean and tidy. Jisc LHD lists five legal deposit libraries (excepting NLS), plus St. Andrews and Senate House Library, as holding complete runs. Good+ A solid copy of the second issue of the limited edition (no. 96/ 350) of K. S. Bhat's fascinating, but short-lived interwar literary magazine, featuring contributions by Oswell Blakeston, the Czech Symbolist poet Otoka B ezina in translation via Paul Selver, Rhys Davies, John Galsworth, Laurence and T. F. Powys, plus Geoffrey West and the communist activist and first British MP (for Labour) of Indian Parsi heritage, Shapurji Saklatvala. "Sensitive people shudder when books are confused with magazines; but Dr. Bhat produced a highbrow magazine that practically was a book": so began the ever playful Oswell Blakeston in his tart retrospective of the interwar oddity, Soma, 30 years on (Blakeston, 1964). According to Blakeston, the very little-known K. S. Bhat was a socially- and literary-minded Indian doctor who practised in an impoverished area of London, often providing his services for free. While based in the UK, Bhat had "decided to send to India some of the creative work he liked best in the English literary scene," hence the robust bindings to facilitate safe travel to the subcontinent. Publication of Soma ceased in 1935, after five issues, when, as planned, the medically up-skilled Bhat returned to India himself.…