Beschreibung:

POUND, Ezra (translator) and Guido CAVALCANTI (c.1250-1300). The Sonnets and Ballate . London: Neill and Company, Limited for Stephen Swift and Co., Ltd., 1912. 8° (192 x 125mm). Woodcut publisher's device on title. Text in English and Italian. 32-page publisher's catalogue printed in red and black bound in at the end. (Scattered light spotting and occasional light marking.) Original streaked grey cloth, lettered in gilt on the upper board and spine, later morocco-backed box (spine slightly darkened, small mark on upper board, extremities lightly rubbed, some splits to book block). Provenance : William Paton Ker (1855-1923, presentation inscription on front free endpaper 'To Professor W.P. Ker. , With apologies for the , fourty nine mistakes , Ezra Pound 1912'; presentation bookplate on upper pastedown, recording the gift of the volume in memory of Ker on 6 December 1923, to:)--Lucy M.M. Gairdner. FIRST ENGLISH EDITION, FIRST ISSSUE WITH CATALOGUE. INSCRIBED BY POUND. Gallup Pound (1983) B4b and note to A8a. E. POUND and G. CAVALCANTI. The Sonnets and Ballate . Boston, MA: The University Press for Small, Maynard and Company, 1912. 4° (200 x 155mm). (Light marginal browning.) Original half parchment, spine lettered in gilt (spine darkened, extremities a little rubbed and chipped). FIRST EDITION. Gallup Pound (1983) B4a. FIRST EDITION AND FIRST ENGLISH EDITION, FIRST ISSUE, THE LATTER INSCRIBED BY POUND TO W.P. KER. William Paton Ker was successively appointed Professor of English Literature at University College of South Wales, Cardiff in 1883 and Professor of English Language and Literature at University College, London in 1889, where he established the Honours School of English and organised the Department of Scandinavian Studies. In 1879 he was appointed to a fellowship at All Souls College, Oxford, and in 1920 was appointed to the Chair of Poetry at Oxford. The English edition of Sonnets and Ballate was published by Stephen Swift and Co., Ltd in May 1912; following the bankruptcy of the publishers in the Autumn of 1912, the remaining bound copies were--like Ripostes , cf. the previous lot--transferred to Elkin Mathews, who sold them from 1913 until 1915, when 'the bulk of this edition destroyed by fire' ([T.S. Eliot and E. Pound] Ezra Pound. His Metric and Poetry (New York: [1918]), p.29). The present copy is notable not only as rare survivor of this edition, but also as an early issue, with an inscription dated 1912, and the original publisher's catalogue present (Gallup notes that in some copies, presumably presented after Swift's failure, the catalogue has been excised). (2)