A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle

MACDIARMID, Hugh. A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle. Edinburgh & London: William Blackwood & Sons Ltd 1926. Signed by the author in Reading in 1960. Also signed by the artist William McCance and B.C.J.G. Knight (whose library the book is from) in the same place, same date. With a slip pasted-in before half-title stating: "Sent by desire of Author". A most interesting association copy not only being signed by the author but by one of Scotland's finest artists of the 20th Century, McCance, and a professor of Microbiology, Knight. Both of the latter were teaching at the time at Reading University and MacDiarmid may have given a reading there where he signed the book. MacDiarmid's early 20th Century masterpiece. Light foxing on some pages, mostly near the beginning and title page the worst affected; all edges slightly foxed, otherwise a Very Good copy. Note: According to Blackwood s records, there were 525 copies in total (both primary and secondary bindings) printed. MacDiarmid, wrote that they struggled to sell any copies. William McCance studied at Glasgow School of Art from 1911-5. In 1918 he married a fellow student, Agnes Miller Parker (one of Britain's leading wood-engravers), and they moved to London two years later. In the early 1920s McCance developed a machine-inspired, near abstract style, much indebted to the work of Wyndham Lewis and the Vorticists. He was one of very few Scottish artists to follow such a path. From 1930 to 1933 he worked as controller of the celebrated Gregynog Press in Wales, where leading British printmakers and typographers produced highly prized, limited-edition books. After Gregynog Press McCance taught book design at the University of Reading. He died in 1970. B. C. J. G. Knight established the Department of Microbiology at the University of Reading where he was Professor. Knight was involved in developing the second world war immunisation programme against tetanus and gas gangrene and helped establish the Society for General Microbiology in 1945 as well as being the founding editor of the Journal of General Microbiology (now Microbiology). He was also a learned francophile. In 1937, using the pseudonym Jonathan Kemp, he translated, with Jean Stewart, Diderot, Interpreter of Nature. He became an authority on the novelist and in 1958 he translated, with Stewart, Stendhal's autobiographical Life of Henri Brulard. Henri Martineau, the principal editor of Stendhal and the best-known authority of the time, enquired of a colleague in Paris whether he had ever met or heard of this remarkable Englishman.…