The Middle Parts of Fortune, Somme & Acre 1916 (1929 ltd. edition)

Item Details

London, The Piazza Press, 1929, Hardcover

1st edition, limited to 550, Very Good ++

London, The Piazza Press, 1929.  Limited Edition of 520 copies. This set is #116. 8 x 5.5 inches, 2 volumes, 226pages, 227-453pages. Brown buckram with gilded title on spine. Marbled endpapers. Gilt top edges. Red type to title. Privately printed on hand made paper. Republished a year later in an expurgated edition titled "Her Privates We".

With hand-written note of previous owner on free endpaper:

"See the printed extract about this book, which was inadvertently pasted by me at the end of Vol. II, early this morning at 4.00 am, when I finished the work of the previous day. It was strange I should paste it there, as if denoting the end of life (?) upside down, too. What does it all mean?" Thos. Walker-Love (?) (see photo)

 

Bindings tight, with light shelf wear on the edges. Pages clean. Very Good ++

Frederic Manning enlisted to fight in World War I and was sent to the Front in 1916. His 2-volume book "The Middle Parts of Fortune", is a fictional account of being an ordinary soldier in the war. It is regarded now as one of the finest accounts of that war, and indeed war in general. It has an unusual publishing history. In the late 1920's there was an increasing interest in World War I accounts and the publisher Peter Davies, a friend of Manning, apparently encouraged him into writing the account (the dedication in the book reads 'To Peter Davies who made me write it'). The 1929 1st edition was limited to 520 copies and issued only to subscribers, under the pseudonym of Private 19022. Manning wrote the book as he had heard his fellow soldiers speak and act - in direct and plain language and the result was highly praised, for example by T E Lawrence and Ernest Hemingway. However, the publisher had decided that the edition for wider publication would be 'an ordinary edition of the same work with certain prunings and excisions' and that it would be published under a different title. Manning never took public ownership for the anonymously published novel and died without fame in 1935. He was only publicly credited as the author in 1943. The complete work was finally published in 1977.