ONE OF 460 COPIES OF T.S. ELIOT'S MASTERPIECE, THE WASTE LAND, HAND-PRINTED BY LEONARD AND VIRGINIA WOOLF AT THEIR HOGARTH PRESS, INSCRIBED BY ELIOT

ELIOT, T.S. The Waste Land. Richmond, Surrey: Hogarth Press, 1923. Octavo, original blue marbled paper boards, printed paper front cover label; pp. 35 (1). Housed in a custom chemise and slipcase. $150,000.

First English edition, one of only 460 copies hand-printed by Leonard and Virginia Woolf at their Hogarth Press, inscribed on the title page, "Inscribed for Woods Gray by T.S. Eliot." Perhaps the greatest and most important poetic work of the 20th century, Eliot's Waste Land "came as a profound shock… Within less than a decade, The Waste Land had attained a kind of eminence from which it has never been dislodged" (Ackroyd, 127-28).

The Waste Land

is the most influential poem of the 20th century, and this edition is considered one of the greatest achievements of the Hogarth Press, published one year after the Boni & Liveright first edition. "On a March afternoon in 1917, Virginia and Leonard Woolf purchased a small handpress from the Excelsior Printing and Supply Company in London. Neither had any training in printing. Undaunted, they bought a do-it-yourself booklet and some Caslon Old Face Roman type and taught themselves. The Hogarth Press was born. Virginia took the role of compositor (setting the type), while Leonard arranged the pages, applied the ink, and performed the manual labor of printing. Then Virginia bound the books…Intrigued by the poem from the first time T.S. Eliot read it aloud to her in the summer of 1922, Virginia Woolf and her husband, Leonard, agreed to publish

The Waste Land in book form" (Virginia Woolf: A Modern Mind, New York Public Library). ""In view of their mutual friendship and interest in each other's work, it is hardly necessary to speculate about the influence the Woolfs had on Eliot's poetry… Mr. Woolf has described the publishing ventures as the work of amateurs: 'No one in 1920 would have published The Waste Land. We started the Hogarth Press in 1917 as a hobby; really the hobby was printing. It was only casually that we published what we printed at first and we suggested to Eliot that we should print and publish poems of his. We first published the book called Poems [1919] and then The Waste Land. The above explains why we printed the book with our own hands.' By publishing Eliot's poems, the Woolfs made a gesture of faith in his work and also helped strengthen his position in England during a crucial period. Today, when the Hogarth Press edition of 'The Waste Land' is a collector's item, every copy necessarily being an 'association copy,' it is difficult to imagine that Eliot ever had trouble finding a publisher, or that when he found one, a small edition of about 460 copies, selling at 4s. 6d. each and published on 12 Sept. 1923, was still in print a year or so later" (Daniel H. Woodward, Notes on the Publishing History and Text of The Waste Land). "The Hogarth Press's subsequent, small-scale edition directly contradicted the impersonal nature of large-scale industrial printing operations, favoring instead a quirky, humanized, even joyfully artistic production process. The Hogarth Press served a different sensibility with its individualized covers and an obvious handcrafting that bordered on sloppiness… Each copy's cover is a unique variation of blue marbled paper glued to boards, and there were three different versions of the title: one with the text boxed with asterisks, one with single rules above and below the text, and one with the text alone. Such whimsical production characteristics distinguish a limited-edition Bloomsbury book from a uniform, industrial mass printing… Eliot himself preferred the Hogarth edition to the Boni & Liveright, writing to Virginia Woolf, 'I am delighted with The Waste Land which has just arrived. Spacing and paging are beautifully planned to make it the right length, far better than the American edition. I'm afraid it gave you a great deal of trouble.' Indeed, it had. Eliot's poem, with its use of multiple languages, varied line indentions, and footnotes, was the most challenging text that the amateur printers had yet tackled. Indeed, Virginia expressed her exhaustion upon completing the job on July 28, 1923: 'We have finished Tom, much to our relief'" (Patrick Hastings, T.S. Eliot, Bloomsbury, and the Hogarth Press).

Copies of the Hogarth Press edition of The Waste Land are quite scarce on the market, and inscribed presentation are of course much more so. The copy we are offering is presented to an academic, William Shelton Gray, Jr., who first met T. S. Eliot at Harvard University in the late 1940s. "I first met Mr. Eliott as an undergraduate student at Harvard University when he came there as a guest lecturer. While he stayed at my dormitory, Eliot House, he asked me to call on him the next time I was in London." Some years later, while Gray was attending the University of Exeter and working on his Ph.D. dissertation, The Symbolic Continuity in the Poems of T. S. Eliot, he took up Eliot's offer and contacted him. "I got to know Mr. Eliot rather well, mostly in his office at Faber and Faber on Russell Square in London. When I knew him it was late in his life. It was in the late 1950s. He had a deep laugh. He suffered from some bronchial condition. He was always humped over like a question mark… He would see anyone who would write a week ahead on Wednesday afternoons after lunch. You had thirty minutes. If your meeting was at three, you were ushered in at three. At three-thirty sharp, a secretary came and that was the end. On the mantel in his office he kept three photographs: one of his [second] wife, one of Virginia Woolf and one of Groucho Marx. When I was writing my dissertation, he was very helpful and read over parts of it and commented on it. Mr. Eliot never ever under any circumstances discussed his own works directly but he would discuss openly the works of others. In informal conversation he would ask me questions about America, about the students' reaction to his work. He said he knew they bought his work because he got the royalties, but that didn't necessarily mean that they read his work. He had a very modest manner, rather unusual, very correct, very proper, very exact and very punctual. He always thought about a question before he would answer it and he would always give you a concise, very precise answer. I think these two qualities—conciseness and precision— tend to characterize him. Mr. Eliot always impressed me as being a very kind and modest person. Through Mr. Eliot and his kindness, I met a number of other writers and interesting people in London, such as Edward Morgan Forster, William Somerset Maugham and Agnes Wilson. In addition, before teaching at Randolph-Macon College, I taught at a boys' prep school in London thanks to Mr. Eliot, who helped me get the job. The last time I saw him he was in his office. I asked him whether he considered himself to be an American or English poet, to which he answered, American" (The William Shelton Gray, Jr. Library, Part II, audio recording). It was apparently at his last meeting with Eliot, in May of 1964, that Gray presented several volumes for Eliot to sign. One was a first edition of Prufrock and Other Observations, which Gray had purchased that day from Bernard Quaritch Ltd. for fifty pounds; another was this first English edition of The Waste Land. In addition, Eliot inscribed Gray's personal copies of Eliot's Complete Poems and Plays and The Sacred Wood, which he used in writing his dissertation. Eliot died in early January 1965.

"Of The Waste Land I shall say nothing but that we should read it every April. It is the breviary of post-war disillusion, 'the hope only of empty men,' written in Switzerland after a near break-down… hard to listen to without tears… 'Eliot's Waste Land is I think the justification of the modern experiment since 1900'" (Pound).
The paper label on the front board is second state (of three), without a border of asterisks but with single-line rules. Gallup A6c. Connolly, 30b. Rhein, 22-24.

Some toning and wear around perimeter. Spine with significant chips (and with a piece reattached at an earlier date). Notoriously rare signed or inscribed.