De Quincey (English Men of Letters). G. K. CHESTERTON ASSOCIATION: HIS FATHER’S COPY, WITH SKETCHES

Description

Full red cloth, black decor and lettering to front board and spine; black publisher’s insignia to rear board. Much worn: spine darkened; boards bubbled and tide-marked at base. 8vo. Front hinge slightly slack. Front endpapers cracked at gutter; rear endpapers likewise, with rear free endpaper now attached to inside rear board at base thanks to water damage. Pictorial bookplate of Edward Chesterton (father of Cecil and G. K. Chesterton) to inside front board, with pen inscription to verso of front free endpaper: ‘E. C. from M. M. J.’ (or M. M. F.) Oct-Birth-/82′. Pencil annots to blank verso of half-title: what appear to be street or house names (S. Parade, Seaview) and lists of times: these have every appearance of being notes taken in a professional capacity by Edward Chesterton, who worked as an estate agent. Pencil annots in a child’s hand to publisher’s advertisement pages to rear: lists of words with their French, German, Latin, and Greek translations, perhaps the work of one of the young Chestertons (G. K. Chesterton would have been 8 in 1882). To recto of rear free endpaper is a pencil sketch of a flamingo with an inordinately long neck, tied in knots, together with an Edward Lear-esque beetle-man with spectacles and antennae. These could be the work of either an older G. K. Chesterton, an inveterate sketcher in book-margins, or of his father, of whom Chesterton notes in his 1937 autobiography that ‘I have inherited, or I hope imitated, his habit of drawing’ (p. 41): the bookplate at the front of the vol., which has signature E. C., is almost certainly his design. G. K. Chesterton was later to write memorably on De Quincey as ‘the first and most powerful of the decadents’, in his 1913 ‘The Victorian Age in Literature’ (p. 24). Whether the drawings here are by father or son, they stand as testament to their shared delight in the fanciful and fantastic. Robust packaging. Tracking can be added to overseas orders on request. Used books are exempt from USA tariffs.