The Mountains [signed by John Piper]

32 x 23cm. Hardcover with worn slipcase, 42pp. Signed by John Piper at front colophon, with an inscription "for Jeanne & Sherman [Stonor] with much love from John & Myfanwy, Christmas 1968" [the Hon. Ralph Robert Watts Sherman Stonor (only son of Lord and Lady Camoys of Stonor Park, Oxfordshire) and Jeanne Stourton (i.e. Dowager Lady Camoys)]. Undated publication, but c.1968. A lavish production printed by Will and Sebastian Carter at the Rampant Lions Press in Cambridge, but published in New York by the Chilmark Press. Illustrated paper-covered boards. The book is illustrated with ten drawings by John Piper engraved on wood by Reynolds Stone with a descriptive note by John Piper. Bound at the Cambridge University Press. One of 240 copies, of which this is numbered 121. Page edges rough cut. Interesting provenance: the Stonors were a landed aristocratic British couple, occasional patrons of artists such as Reynolds Stone - their daughter Julia Camoys Stonor wrote a memoir of Jeanne Stonor in 2006 alleging that her mother had murdered her husband in 1976, and that she was a Nazi sympathizer and had adulterous relationships with other men including Joachim von Ribbentrop. Some splitting to slipcase, which is fragile and in a perilous state. Book is in very good condition indeed.…