In the middle of next month, Bonhams in Oxford will be selling to volumes by Uranian poet Charles Sayle, Erotidia and Musa Consolatrix. Sayle was a literary scholar and librarian at Cambridge University. He had something of a coterie around him in Cambridge of young and mainly gay young men and among them was someone who has featured on this blog a few times, the tragic and beautiful George Mallory. The first of these two lots at Bonhams is inscribed to Mallory who at the time, was a 22 year old undergraduate.
Sayle was an elegant wordsmith and I have always been rather touched by the printed dedicatory letter to John Haden Badley in Musa Consolatrix I imagine there are many of us who would like to know someone capable of such epistolary expressions of affection!
