Sassenach Stray, A Set of Eight Variations and Tailpiece by Ross Nichols, who jotted also the sketches.

FIRST EDITION, 8vo, pp. 63, [1]. Original black cloth, spine lettered in gilt, yellow dustjacket printed in black. Boards a little mottled, dustjacket somewhat soiled. A very scarce early travelogue by occultist and modern Druid Ross Nichols (1902-1975), published by Reginald Caton?s Fortune Books, which gained some notoriety in the 1930s for its disregard of copyright law and propensity for publishing gay erotica, and would go on to publish debut collections of poetry by both Philip Larkin and Kingsley Amis, and reputedly never pay either of them. Nichols made the trip in the summer of 1939, by which time he was a vegetarian pacifist with a cabin at the utopian nudist colony of Spielplatz, where he would later meet founder of modern Wicca Gerald Gardner, and go on to edit his ?Witchcraft Today? in 1954, for which he receives warm thanks in the preface. Sassenach Stray is eccentric and discursive, finding room in its scant 64 pages for digressions into ?the Lawrentian man [.] deliberately dwelling in his beastlike part?, and rather purple in its prose, with a congregation approaching its church described as ?A crocodile of the blackhatted godly kirkward wending? Library Hub records 5 holdings: BL, NLS, Cambridge, Oxford and The London Library. …