The Holy Places
London and New York: The Queen Anne Press / The British Book Centre, 1954. First edition. Large octavo (9 3/8 inches tall), original red cloth, gilt spine, top edge red, original pictorial dust jacket. Book fine, slight toning and edge-wear to jacket spine. An excellent copy. Item #1839
"THE PILGRIM'S INSTINCT IS DEEP-SET IN THE HUMAN HEART"
First American edition of two travel essays by Evelyn Waugh—one of 950 copies (this copy unnumbered)—of the first publication of The Queen Anne Press and its Director, Ian Fleming. Decorated with four colored wood engravings by Reynolds Stone: a frontispiece (captioned in Latin with two lines from Crux fidelis), two chapter-opening vignettes, and a colophon (also captioned in Latin) from the Improperia: "My people, what have I done to you? How have I offended you? Answer me!" An Advance Review Copy with a laid-in publisher's slip, noting a publication date of February 1, 1954.
The Queen Anne Press was established in 1951 to publish limited editions of contemporary authors. Ian Fleming, along with his wife Ann, served as the Director of the Press until his death in 1964. A brief introductory note, "Work Abandoned" (dated, "E.W./Stinchcombe 1952") details an inspiring journey to Jerusalem during Christmastide, 1935. Jerusalem was then under British administration and the thirty-two-year-old Waugh was flush with equal measures of English pride and piety. "So elated was I by the beauties about me that I there and then began vaguely planning a series of books—semi-historic, semi-poetic fiction, I did not quite know what—about the long, intricate, intimate relations between England and the Holy Places."
These prefatory remarks introduce two essays: St. Helena Empress and The Defence of the Holy Places. The first essay revives the claim (originally asserted in Waugh's novel Helena) that the mother of the Emperor Constantine was British. Waugh incorporates the 12th century legend, originated by Geoffrey of Monmouth, that Helena, as the daughter of the king of Colchester, was a British princess. He casts the quest of the Empress Dowager in search of the True Cross as the labor of a practical, everyday sort of saint: "What we can learn from Helena is something about the workings of God: that he wants a different thing from each of us, laborious or easy, conspicuous or quite private, but something which only we can do and for which we we each created."
The second essay is the result of Waugh's journey to Jerusalem on behalf of Life magazine in 1951. The pride and optimism of the pilgrimage of his youth have now faded but a visit to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem—with its competing Latin, Greek, and Armenian presences—spurs Waugh to a reverie that closes with a moment of clarity: "Different races and creeds jostle one another for centuries and their diversity becomes only the more accentuated. Our Lord was born into a fiercely divided civilization and so it has remained. But our hope must always be for unity, and as long as the Church of the Selpuchre remains a single building, however subdivided, it forms a memorial to that essential hope." Ahearn APG/Waugh, 027e.
Price: $350.00