Title: The Sweeniad
Publication Date: 1957
Binding: Hardcover
Condition: Very Good
Dust Jacket Condition: Good
Edition: 1st Edition
66 printed pages (very slight occasional foxing). Owner's ink signature on front free endpaper. Pencil annotations throughout. 14.7 X 22.7CM. Original red cloth (very slightly faded), complete with original salmon dust-jacket printed in red and green (slight wear to edges). This is a mock epic parody of T. S. Eliot written by Victor Purcell, a Cambridge D. Phil. in Far Eastern History, under the pseudonym Myra Buttle. Provenance: this copy belonged to and was annotated by Francis Meynell. Meynell (1891-1975) was a British poet, typographer and founder of the Nonesuch Press. In 1956, Meynell's Nonesuch Press had published Eliot's contribution to "From the Third Programme. A Ten-Years’ Anthology. Edited by John Morris". Meynell's mother, Alice (1847-1922), had been a popular poet, mentioned as a possible Poet Laureate, but whose work had been completed overshadowed by T.S.Eliot's poetry. Whereas Alice had been a notable suffragist, Eliot privately regretted “the monopolization of literature by women” in a letter to Ezra Pound on April 15, 1915.