The Temple : Signed by the Author

The First UK Printing published by Faber and Faber, London in 1988. 8vo., red-brown publisher's cloth, lettered in white to spine with publisher's device to foot; photographic wraparound wrapper by Herbert List; The BOOK a near-Fine copy, slightly bumped at foot of spine with pages evenly lightly toned, as is common; the WRAPPER also near-Fine, clipped, with just a few light spots to extremities and spine a touch faded. The wrapper is protected in a removable Brodart archival cover. Signed (without dedication) by the author in green ink to the title page. Spender was just twenty years old when he completed the first draft of 'The Temple'. Dedicated to W. H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood, the work was semi-autibiographical, and described a narrator known only as 'S', who goes to stay with a family in Hamburg in the Summer of 1929. It was many years later that the English poet and author John Fuller wrote to Spender informing him that he had found his manuscript in the Rare Books section of the humanities Center of the University of Texas. "I had completely forgotten that in 1962, during some financial crisis of the kind to which poets are liable, I had sold the manuscript to Texas University", Spender writes in the introduction. Spender subsequently rewrote the novel, and sent it to his publisher, along with a few other friends - Auden, Isherwood, Plomer etc. - for approval. In many ways a rebellion against the laws of censorship which were prevalent at the time (Spender was told he would be unable to publish due to the 'pornographic' and 'libellous' nature of the writing, and its open depictions of homosexuality), the book is also an interesting combination of two periods of time. Written before the Second World War, and published after, its setting makes the result a "complex of memory, fiction and hindsight". At the initial time of writing, Spender spoke of Germany as a liberal society, certainly more than the UK, and particularly in regard to relationships between men. It nonetheless demonstrates the harbingers of Nazism which were to come. The book was finally published here for the first time, twenty one years after the decriminalisation of homosexuality in Britain. Uncommon signed. Ashton Rare Books welcomes direct contact.