The jacket on the 1915, Heinemann, first English edition of Somerset Maugham’s Of Human Bondage, seen right, is a bit frayed and chipped and has in fact been supplied from another copy, but any copy in a jacket is of the utmost rarity and this one sports a copy of the “suppressed” version of the jacket.
According to Somerset Maugham’s bibliographer, Raymond Toole Stott, the first jacket design was rejected – possibly because Philip Carey is seen with his club foot on the wrong leg – and as the 5000 replacements only arrived with the binder just a day prior to publication, it is possible that a few books had already been fitted out with the original version.
Inscribed to New York collector Norman Unger, “I wrote this novel in 1912 &1913, corrected the proof in Flanders during the winter of 1914, & it was published in 1915 in a world too busy with war to bother with it”, it made $1400 in 1981 as part of the Marjorie Wiggin Prescott library at Christie’s New York, but last month it sold for $42,500 (£24,000).
Inscribed by the author to Californian librarian and bookman Paul Jordan Smith in 1937, shortly after his arrival in Los Angeles, where, later that year, he started to write screenplays, this 1932 first of Aldus Huxley’s Brave New World showed slight fraying to spine ends and a little staining to a front endpaper, but a valuation of around $5000 was converted into a bid of $25,000 (£14,115). One of 324 signed, large paper copies of the first edition, in original bright yellow buckram with a blue morocco gilt spine label, it sold at $4000 (£2260).
Wrong-footed Somerset Maugham jacket design brings $42,500
THE first part of the Maurice F. Neville collection of modern literature, which sold for a premium-inclusive $5.22m (£2.95m) at Sotheby’s New York on April 13, was primarily but certainly not wholly focused on the work of American writers. Seen here are two of the English books that brought strong results.
