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BOOKS AND LETTERS FROM THE LIBRARY OF ANTHONY POWELL
Lot 324

THOMAS (DYLAN)
18 Poems, FIRST EDITION, FIRST ISSUE, AUTHOR'S PRESENTATION COPY, INSCRIBED "To Tony Powell/Dylan Thomas. 1935" on front free endpaper, The Sunday Referee and the Panton Bookshop, [1934]

24 June 2015, 11:00 BST
London, Knightsbridge

Sold for £6,875 inc. premium

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THOMAS (DYLAN)

18 Poems, FIRST EDITION, FIRST ISSUE, AUTHOR'S PRESENTATION COPY, INSCRIBED "To Tony Powell/Dylan Thomas. 1935" on front free endpaper, half-title, light spotting, publisher's black cloth, gilt lettering on flat spine [Rolph B1a; Connolly, The Modern Movement, 78a], 8vo, The Sunday Referee and the Panton Bookshop, [1934]

Footnotes

FIRST EDITION, INSCRIBED BY DYLAN THOMAS TO FELLOW WELSH AUTHOR ANTHONY POWELL. Five hundred sets of sheets were printed but only 250 copies were originally bound and issued on about 18 December 1934.

Dylan Thomas sent a copy of 18 Poems to Cyril Connolly, who was immediately taken with the work and invited Thomas "for drinks with their friends, the novelist Anthony Powell and his wife Lady Violet at their flat in Great Ormond Street. These two Old Etonian writers were not Dylan's usual Fitzrovia cronies... [but] the Welshman made enough of an impression to be asked back for a formal dinner..." (Andrew Lycett, Dylan Thomas: A New Life, 2005). Recalling this celebrated 'Connolly dinner' Powell noted "Everyone thought (as it turned out not wholly correctly) what a nice young man Dylan Thomas was, who knew how to drink just the right amount, and just what degree of literary ribaldry to indulge in" (Powell, Miscellaneous Verdicts, 1990, p.349).

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