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Elephant Hide boards (cream back, red patterned sides), with no dustwrapper, as issued. From the author's own stock, this copy inscribed and signed twice by the author, with non-matching numbers, on the front free endpaper, "Ted Hughes 35/88", and, on p.[4], "No. 2 Ted Hughes". The printer's limitation statement reads simply: "Two hundred copies of this book were printed and bound for April 1971, a hundred each going to poet and printer". Alan Tarling of Poet & Printer told the poet's bibliographers, Keith Sagar and Stephen Tabor, in 1976, "These poems were excluded for personal reasons from [Hughes's] Crow opus and he offered them to me in March 1970. The printing and casing-in lasted until April 71 when I began sending off copies. There were 200, a hundred each going to poet (TH) and printer (me) plus 30 review or academic copies. None of mine was signed and each cost £2.25, though I gave some to friends and relatives. All the 'academic' copies were gratis, and said as much in an extra colophon . . . I don't know how TH's copies were distributed or whether or not they were signed." Hughes obviously intended to number and sign all his 100 copies (one is inscribed "No. 100"), and started doing so on p.[4], the title-page verso, below the limitation statement. However he later forgot this protocol, and numbered and signed 88 copies on the front free endpaper: thus, some copies, like this one, are inscribed twice. "I had exploded, a bombcloud, lob-headed, my huge fingers / Came feeling over the fields, like shadows. / I became smaller than water, I stained into the soil-crumble. / I became smaller. / My eyes fell out of my head and into an atom. / My right leg stood in the room raving at me like a dog . . ." (title poem). Sold in aid of the reading and literacy charity Give a Book. Seller Inventory # 18M600206
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