About this Item
Published by The Fortune Press in 1942, and reprinted in many variants of cloth binding - the true first edition was published in a small print run in 1934 by The Sunday Referee and The Parton Bookshop. ***Very good in bright-green boards with gilt-stamped titles to the spine. The gilt is still beautifully bright, having been protected by the dustwrapper. The boards are clean and unmarked. Head and tail of spine and top corner tip of back board slightly creased. Page block edges clean with no foxing. Spine tight with no reading lean or spine creases. Internally also very good with a previous ownership name crossed out in black ink on the front pastedown. There is also a note in pencil on the rear free endpaper - "Many a mad magenta minute, Light the lavender of life." - possibly a quote from one of the poems. No other annotations. There is some light offsetting and staining affecting the gutter between endpapers and pastedowns - interior pages clean without any foxing. No creases or tears. ***In a very good mustard-yellow, black-printed dustwrapper, which has been neatly corner price-clipped. The top corner of the front flap is clipped. The dustwrapper is virtually complete, with just some very small areas of loss at the head and tail of the spine and corner tips. The edges of the dustwrapper are slightly creased, nicked and rubbed, but there are no significant chips. There is a 6cm closed tear at the outer top corner of the front panel, which slightly affects the titles. The back panel of the dustwrapper is extremely clean. The spine of the dustwrapper is also hardly browned at all, and the black titles are very clear. This copy has a dustwrapper with no publisher's blurb on the foldover flaps. ***230mm x145mm. 32 pages. ***'"18 Poems" is the first book of poetry written by the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas, published in 1934 as the winner of a contest sponsored by Sunday Referee. The collection introduced Thomas's new and distinctive style of poetry. This was characterised by tightly metered, rhyming verse and an impassioned tone. Written in his "womb- tomb period", the poems explore dark themes of love, death and birth, employing a rich combination of sexual connotations and religious symbolism. The lyricism and intensity of the poems in the book contrasted with the emotional restraint shown in the poetry of the successful modernist poets that worked as his contemporaries. The book received critical acclaim, but was not initially commercially successful. The poem, "The force that through the green fuse drives the flower", is known as the poem that "made Thomas famous", and also appears in the book. The poems are considered by many to be evocative but difficult to understand. Critic and contemporary of Thomas, Geoffrey Grigson, said that, regarding the influence of prominent poets on Thomas, the young poet was "untainted with Eliot or with Auden --- whose poems, though a bit unintelligible, sounded at least familiar in an old grandiloquent way. The poems in "18 poems" are untitled and are often referred to by their first lines.' (Wiki) ***A Fortune Press edition of Dylan Thomas' first published collection, complete in its original thin and fragile dustwrapper. Finding copies of "18 Poems" in well-preserved original dustwrappers is becoming increasingly difficult as they were printed on very thin paper, and are prone to edge wear, creasing, chips and fading. This was his first published book of poetry after winning the Sunday Referee's "Poets' Corner Prize," which led to the first publication of this book in 1934. ***For all our books, postage is charged at cost, allowing for packaging: any shipping rates indicated on ABE are an average only: we will reduce the P & P charge where appropriate - please contact us for postal rates for heavier books and sets etc.
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