The Lives and Deaths of Roland Greer

PYKE, Richard. The Lives & Deaths of Roland Greer. London: Richard Cobden Sanderson. 1928. 8vo. First edition, first printing. Publisher’s black cloth lettered in pale red to the spine, in the marvellous dust jacket designed by John Gower Parks. This copy inscribed by the author at the front endpaper: ‘Inscribed by the author for Lancelot Simpson, who paid him the compliment of buying this copy. Richard Pyke, February 27th 1932’, with two further authorial annotations to margins of the text. A very good example, the cloth very gently bumped to spine tips with some very faint marks to boards. The binding tight and square, the contents largely fine, with obituary clipping pasted in to front pastedown beneath the jacket flap, the endpapers slightly toned, else clean throughout. The dust jacket complete, priced 7/6 net to the spine panel which is slightly faded and toned, the corners and spine tips gently rubbed with some small nicks, one closed tear to the front joint lower, but a delightful copy overall. An uncommon psychological novel whose principal character—the titular Roland, a spiritual hermaphrodite—leads the author’s only novel to appear on many a list of gay literature. Though this is categorically true, the novel seems fundamentally a psychological study of personality over sex and sexuality, at least on this cataloguer’s brief reading, and always with a burgeoning interior quarrel, existential, with some sharp sections on religion and atheism. Pyke was educated at Clifton College and, after a short war service, read Economics at King’s College, Cambridge. After postgraduate study in the field of psychology, he undertook a series of investigations on ‘The Legibility of Print’ for the Medical Research Council which remains a foundational text on the subject. He died in Shanghai in 1938, at the age of 38, hence this one and only novel—a travel book was his only other creative output. Of equal interest is the dust jacket designer; John Gower Parks, a theatre set designer and artist whose foray into this medium is very limited indeed. Scarce, especially with author’s inscription.…