My Canoe [signed by translator]

One of six hundred copies, this example inscribed by the translator who was the first British soldier to escape a German POW camp during the First World War and return to Britain. The translator has inscribed the first blank: 'Bertram Ratcliffe Linton Wetherby Yorkshire'. Near fine book, otherwise unmarked, in near very good jacket, a little rubbing at the head and tail of the spine, not price-clipped. Ratcliffe's remarkable war service earned him tea with the king and a Military Cross - his epitaph on his death in 1991 was 'Soldier, Writer, Poet, Lover'. He had been captured early in the war and sent to Ingolstadt in Bavaria after being wounded at the Battle of the Marne. After several attempts his mother managed to smuggle a compass to him in a tin of Harrogate toffee, and when the chance came in 1917 he escaped all the way back to England.