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Lot 275•
HUGHES (TED) A remarkable collection of 106 works inscribed to his friend and manuscript advisor Roy Davids, including some 63 with the addition of a manuscript poem, and 4 with a drawing, [c.1957-1995]
Amended
24 June 2015, 11:00 BST
London, KnightsbridgeSold for £10,000 inc. premium
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HUGHES (TED)
A remarkable collection of 106 works inscribed to his friend and manuscript advisor Roy Davids, including some 63 with the addition of a manuscript poem, and 4 with a drawing, many first editions, some limited editions, as issued in publishers' bindings, the majority with dust-jackets where issued, various sizes, but mostly 8vo, [c.1957-1995]
Footnotes
An extensive collection of books written or with contributions by Ted Hughes, all warmly inscribed to Roy Davids, including 63 with the addition of a poem, the majority of which impromptu, and seemingly unpublished.
From their first meeting in 1979 (see footnote to previous lot) Hughes and Davids formed a close friendship, which lasted until Hughes' death in 1998. Davids recalled "To be the beneficiary of that [Hughes'] Shakespearean mind and that prodigious memory. To be bathed in Ted's impromptu and wonderful language, bulging with metaphors, ideas and possibilities. These were golden times in my life" (www.roydavids.com/tedstable.htm). Included are the dedication copies of Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being, 1992 ("For Roy / Hair by hair you may pluck a wild boar bald [with some actual boar hair taped in] love Ted 9th March, 1992"), the first paperback edition of the same ("Formerly Court Green Bathroom Copy - now Roy Davids's gnawing copy from the one-time author Ted [further annotated with arrow to "Gnawing":] "as in starvation, as in rage, as in ignorance, as in being negative"), and The Essential Shakespeare (1991).
The added poems - totalling upwards of 750 lines - range in length from 4 lines to a 140-line poem (on the endpapers of The Best Worker in the World, 1985) titled "Smolt Surplus Verse", beginning "Half a million of him come/to a river ten miles long/and last year in Alaska two/Hundred million strong, my dears..."). The poems range in tone, sometimes relating to the contents of the book in which they were written: for example "South of Mex/-co Possum's/the creature sex... better, best/play Possum" in A Dancer to God; "The prophetic tale of Leonard's [Baskin] pituitarectomy... Bad owls/Dud hawks/By the beakfull/and the clawfull.." in Cave Birds; "At the bottom of a hole/Orpheus found a mole..." in Orpheus; "Tablets from Sinai/Were o.k. for the Jews/But for the sleepless eye/The best medicine to use/is Ovid's bedtime pills..." (signed with 11 variant spellings of Hughes) in Tales from Ovid; "My Granny", a 44-line poem starting "My granny is an octopus..." in Meet My Folks! (1961).
Many of the books were presented to Davids in the year of publication, to mark birthdays, Christmas (e.g. 'The Hughog Portrait' full-page "self-portrait" as a wild boar drawing in Rain-charm for a Duchy, 1991) or other notable events ("After drunken Dublin/in a grubby London dawn/With eyes at half-goggle/and brains still in pawn" in Under the North Star, 1981), but it is apparent that others, particularly the titles published prior to their meeting, were inscribed specifically for Davids's collection, formed, it seems, in some ways as a collaboration between the two friends. For instance, in a copy of little-known play The Tiger's Bones (1974) inscribed in 1983, Hughes notes "The harvest of dregs is very great", and in a first edition copy of Lupercal (1960, inscribed in 1983) "Twenty three year!/a hell of a time/To be dawdling here/at the scene of the crime!!"
A full listing is available upon request.
Saleroom notices
Copyright is with the Ted Hughes Estate.