The Destructive Element: A Study of Modern Writers and Beliefs

First Edition ( 'First Published 1935', NAP). Stephen Spender takes on Henry James, Yeats, T.S. Eliot, D. H. Lawrence, Edward Upward, Franz Kafka, and Laurens van der Post. You can see the covers in the photos. They have held up quite nicely. There is partial rubbing of the color on a few of the letters on the front cover. On the spine the coloring of the letters is very faded but you can read the letters all the same. The covers are pretty clean, just a few small spots on the rear. The cover edges look very good, no rubbing. That's also the case with the cover corners. The spine ends look very good, the top one has a couple of tiny nicks. The top page edge is brown. It looks very good. The middle and bottom page edges have some very light tan spotting. The bottom page edge appears to be deckled or rough-cut, but the bottom edges are all smooth, a small number of them are a little shorter than most of the others. The book is square and the spine is straight. The binding is quite solid, no spaces between any of the facing pages, nicely tight covers, good junctures. An extremely thin bit of an outward crease on the front inside cover created what has the appearance of a scratch on the first few pages, nothing very significant. Scrolling through the pages I'm not finding any creasing. There is some very light tan spotting on the blank front end paper and half-title page. You will find an occasional small tan spot of foxing in the text, having migrated from the middle page edge. But the pages are very clean. There are no markings in the book. No attachments of any kind. And no one has written their name or anything else anywhere. Stephen Spender on Henry James, Yeats, T. S. Eliot, D. H. Lawrence, Franz Kafka, Laurens van der Post and Edward Upward, among others. …