Quantcast
Channel: Front Free Endpaper
Viewing all articles
Browse latest Browse all 636

A Francis King Collection Sold

$
0
0

It sometimes happens in bookselling, if you are lucky, that whole collections can be kept intact. I recently bought this great collection of books by and ephemera about Francis King, most of them signed and inscribed, and I was delighted to sell it the whole collection before the collection was complete. However, it seemed that I'd done enough work to merit finishing off the catalogue for browsing only.

King died in 2011 and as often happens in the years or an authors old age and just after their death, their renown is not as great as it has been and it can take a short while for people to begin to appreciate them again. I'm sure this will happen with King and I'll be delighted to see it when it does. His work is always keenly observed and more often than not taken from the people, incidents and settings in his own life. In fact, this drawing from life once got King into extremely hot water when the former labour MP, and then friend of the author, Tom Skeffington-Lodge, recognised himself in a somewhat unkind portrait in the Mss of one of King's books, A Domestic Animal. The edition had been printed and review copies sent but publication day hadn't been reached. Skeffington-Lodge called his lawyers and the whole edition had to be pulped. One of the real rarities in this collection is a signed copy of one of the escapees from the pulping machine.

Although I can't offer any of these items to you all to buy this time, I do hope that you will enjoy browsing the catalogue here:


Viewing all articles
Browse latest Browse all 636

Trending Articles