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Books - Fine Bindings
Other Men’s Flowers, finely bound for Asprey
Title Other Men’s Flowers: An Anthology of Poetry. Author WAVELL, A. P., FIELD-MARSHAL EARL WAVELL. Printer / Publisher Jonathan Cape Place of Publication London Format 8vo Binding Bound in red morocco for Asprey, the covers with a gilt triple fillet; spine gilt in compartments, the outer panels tooled with roses and foliage on a dotted ground and lettered direct in the second and fourth; all edges gilt; broad gilt dentelles worked with a scrolling foliate roll; stone-marbled endpapers in rose, grey and charcoal, the front free endpaper stamped ASPREY & CO. LTD. LONDON. Collation 448 pp Features The Memorial Edition of 1952, reset in 1958 and reprinted in this format in 1968; the copyright leaf records the full sequence of impressions from 1944. Date 1968 Condition Fine and unrubbed, the gilt bright.
Wavell assembled this anthology out of the poems he knew by heart, and published it in 1944 while serving as Viceroy of India, in the middle of a war he had spent commanding in the Middle East and the Far East. It became one of the most widely sold poetry anthologies of the century, and remains in print. The title comes from Montaigne, quoted on the title page: I have gathered a posie of other men’s flowers and nothing but the thread that binds them is my own.
The introduction to the Memorial Edition, present in this and every subsequent printing, was written by the compiler’s son. Archibald John Arthur Wavell had fought with the Chindits in Burma, lost his left hand there, and was awarded the Military Cross; he succeeded as second Earl on his father’s death in 1950, and wrote the introduction for the memorial issue of 1952. On Christmas Eve 1953, leading a patrol of the Black Watch against a Mau Mau gang in a wood at Thika, north of Nairobi, he was shot and killed in the first exchange of a long engagement. He was thirty-seven, unmarried, and the last of his line; the earldom became extinct with him. His headstone in Nairobi is inscribed He found the poetry of Man’s endeavour.