Thursday, February 23, 2012

World War II in Manuscripts, Poetry and Drawings

Bonhams fine book sale takes place on 27th March at the Montpelier Street galleries in Knightsbridge 

The sale contains several signed works by Winston Churchill each with presentation inscriptions to Neville Chamberlain including Great Contemporaries, The World Crisis and Marlborough – his Life and Times. On the flyleaf of the final volume of Marlborough published in September 1938, just prior to the Munich Agreement, Churchill has written with a mixture of dark wit and prophecy, "Perhaps you may like to take refuge in the eighteenth century."

The war-poet Richard Spender was killed in action in 1943 during Operation Torch. The Observer wrote that his free style had "a passionate appetite for all lively and beautiful things." He himself wrote concerning his work, "It is of poems of now, & I hope they are full of the life, urgency & wonder that is truth… the book's net tone is one (I hope) of optimistic resolve." This quotation is taken from one of numerous autograph letters and other papers to relatives and friends (including his three aunts who acted as his literary agents) to be offered in March. The lot's central items are manuscripts of the nine poems published posthumously as Parachute Battalion: Last Poems from England and Tunisia (November 1943) and a set of unbound page proofs for his first book of poems, Laughing Blood, one with corrections and revisions seemingly by Spender.
bonhams
Ronald Searle's illustrations provide a moving pictorial record of the war in the East. Prior to his fame for illustrating the worlds of St. Trinian's and Molesworth he documented the brutal conditions and sufferings undergone as a prisoner-of-war in the Japanese Changi prison camp in Singapore, hiding almost three hundred sketches under his mattress. The four pen and watercolour items on offer here are an anniversary, Christmas and two birthday cards drawn by Searle and his cell-mates (illustrated) 

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