The Britwell Court-Lytton Strachey-Roger Senhouse-Jerrold Northrup Moore copy!
Lytton Strachey acquired the book following the dispersal of the Britwell Court Library (1916-1927) before leaving it to his final lover, Roger Senhouse and, according to a postcard laid in, it was then ‘bought... at Roger Senhouse’s sale of LS’s library in the late 60’s.’
The purchaser at that sale, John Porter, a renowned collector of William Pickering imprints, continues in his postcard: ‘No doubt Lytton wd have been spitting from another place, thinking he had left his library with a loyal guardian.’ Porter subsequently gave the volume to the musicologist and book collector Jerrold Northrop Moore (1934-2024) to whom the postcard is addressed.
The book is bound in ‘drab’ (Porter’s word in his postcard) cloth, lacking the spine label, faded and rubbed. Internally about very good with a short inscription by Northop Moore to the spare spine label at the end: ‘sent as a gift to JNM 14.iv.09’.
Dora Carrington’s book label (2.5x2cm version) for Lytton Strachey appears on the front pastedown; in pencil above is a Britwell library case mark: ‘Lib. N.2.’
Lytton Strachey’s bookplate was designed by his friend Dora Carrington who had a premonition while affixing them to his books in 1931: ’As I stuck the book plates in with Lytton I suddenly thought of Sothebys and the book plates in some books I had looked at, when Lytton was bidding for a book and I thought: These books will one day be looked at by those gloomy faced booksellers and buyers. And suddenly a premonition of a day when these labels will no longer (be) in this library came over me. I longed to ask Lytton not to stick in any more.’
A few months later he was dead.
Strachey wrote about Donne in his 1922 essay collection, Books and Characters, French & English, describing him as ‘the father of all the conceits and elaborations of the seventeenth century’.
