My Army, O, My Army! and Other Songs
Sydney, Tyrrell's Limited, 1915 [first edition].
Quarto, 128 pages plus a frontispiece portrait with tissue-guard, and a loosely-inserted colour plate by Norman Lindsay.
Quarter contrasting cream and two-tone grey cloth, with an illustration based on the loosely-inserted plate printed in brown on the front cover; edges uncut; covers a little bowed, with the spine a little marked; edges, endpapers and adjacent leaves foxed; frontispiece slightly creased and marked with a couple of tiny edge tears; an excellent copy.
One of only 250 copies of the deluxe large-paper edition; this copy is unnumbered. Henry Lawson (1867-1922) suffered 'a ghastly decline' in his creativity from the turn of the century. He 'wrote a great deal despite his often squalid circumstances but his work alternated between desperate revivals of old themes and inspirations and equally desperate and unsuccessful attempts to break new ground. Maudlin sentimentality and melodrama, often incipient even in some earlier work, invaded both his prose and poetry', including this book ('Australian Dictionary of Biography'). However, this first edition is genuinely scarce, and it includes well-known poems such as 'Song of the Dardanelles' and 'Fighting Hard'. The colour plate by Norman Lindsay is a reworking of Delacroix's painting 'Liberty leading the people', with Lawson himself pictured at the lower left. This design is featured on the cover of the standard edition in pictorial wrappers, and (in monochrome) on the cover of this edition.
Item #130540
Price (AUD):
$500.00