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BOOKS AND LETTERS FROM THE LIBRARY OF ANTHONY POWELL
Lot 315

ORWELL (GEORGE)
Autograph letter signed ("George"), to the novelist Anthony Powell ("Dear Tony"), describing his reviewing work for the Times Literary Supplement and reporting on improved health having embarked on a course of streptomycin, Ward 3, Hairmyres Hospital, East Kilbride, Lanarkshire, 8 March 1948

24 June 2015, 11:00 BST
London, Knightsbridge

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ORWELL (GEORGE)

Autograph letter signed ("George"), to the novelist Anthony Powell ("Dear Tony"), describing his reviewing work for the Times Literary Supplement and reporting on improved health having embarked on a course of streptomycin ("...I am having a drug called streptomycin, which is a novelty in this country but is thought to be vy good. It appears to be doing its stuff, though it's too early for them to say for certain. The doctor says that my lung is healing up fast & that I ought to be out & about by the summer..."); after giving further news of Richard, who has been tested for TB, and his flat, he devotes the final paragraph to a discussion of the forthcoming uniform edition: "I've arranged to bring out my uniform edition at the rate of a volume a year, & at present I have got six books to go in it, as I have suppressed several. I hope they'll be others later... I had always wanted to have something vy sort of chaste but solid in blue buckram for about 5/-. I notice both Evelyn Waugh's & Graham Greene's uniform editions are vy cheap-looking. They don't seem to be able to make a book now with covers that don't bend. It makes me vy envious to see American books", 3 pages, on lined paper, slight crumpling and contemporary drink-stains, 8vo, Ward 3, Hairmyres Hospital, East Kilbride, Lanarkshire, 8 March 1948

Footnotes

'EVELYN WAUGH'S & GRAHAM GREENE'S UNIFORM EDITIONS ARE VERY CHEAP-LOOKING' – Orwell to Powell on the publishing standards of his books.

Among the reviews he mentions is "a rather dreadful anthology of recent American stuff called 'Spearhead'": this appeared in the TLS on 17 April 1948 and offered a long and wide-ranging review of current American poetry and prose, taking sideswipes at, among others, William Carlos Williams and E.E. Cummings, 'an irritating writer'; and noting that 'Henry Miller's favourite verb has been laboriously blacked out by hand, over a stretch of fifty pages'.

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