ABINGER HARVEST

1936. [fine in fine jacket] London: Edward Arnold, (1936). Original dark blue cloth, with dust jacket.

First Edition, first issue (with "A Flood in the Office"), of this collection of "about eighty" essays and reviews -- including pieces on T.S. Eliot, Marcel Proust, Virgina Woolf, Sinclair Lewis, Joseph Conrad, T.E. Lawrence and Jane Austen. The volume is named for the village, Abinger Hammer, where Forster lived for many years with his mother. Soon after this book was published, a libel action caused the publisher to recall as many copies as possible, in which "A Flood in the Office" was removed and sent back out with cancelled pages 277-282 (truncated) (the second issue); later editions do not have this piece. It is actually a review Forster had written in 1919 (it appeared then in The Athenæum), of THE NILE PROJECTS by Sir William Willcocks: in that book Willcocks had accused his superior, the engineer Sir Murdoch Macdonald, of purposely overestimating the amount of Nile water available. Macdonald had sued Willcocks for libel at the time Willcocks's book came out, but because the legal action was in Egypt, Forster and his publisher Arnold knew nothing about it when deciding to include the piece in ABINGER HARVEST, 17 years later. When Arnold discovered (or was notified of) the earlier suit in Egypt, he scrambled to remove the Nile piece from this book; Forster referred to his old review as now being "automatically radioactive" [see W.H. Stone pp 286-287]. This volume is in fine condition, and remarkably, so is the dust jacket; furthermore, loosely inserted are two Arnold promotional pieces that accompanied publication. Kirkpatrick A18a. (Inventory #: 15702)