Now Love the More

FIRST EDITION. Side-stapled booklet (21.6 x 14cm), pp. 48. Cream card wrappers, front wrapper lettered and striped in black. Toned, soiled, crumpled and dented, edgewear. Occasional scatters of spots, staples rusty, else, clean. Good+ Scarce. OCLC finds 5 holdings (British & Irish legal deposit libraries only). A brief, but dense and sprawling, treatise on love, extracted from Bates' unfinished novel, which "was for a long time entitled Sons Without Mothers, which is how Proust once described homosexuals," but which grew "to be about so many more things than homosexuality" (Foreword). Bates touches on Shakespeare, jazz, Christianity, Communism and contemporary race relations. With a printed dedications: "For E. M Forster and John Osbourne with affection and admiration [.] And, for I. with love". Not the actor, Alan Bates (1929-) was a Leicester-based poet and Chairman of the Leicester Poetry Society in the 1960s.