Forster, E.M.
4 books from his library
£756
Auction: 05 February 2025 from 10:00 GMT
Description
Landells, E. The Boy's Own Toy-Maker: a Practical Illustrated Guide to the Useful Employment of Leisure Hours. Sixth Edition. London: Griffith and Farran, 1873. 16mo, original cloth, wood-engraved illustrations throughout the text, printed book-label, ‘This book belongs to E. M. Forster’, mounted to corner of front free endpaper, with inscription below ink black ink, ‘Given me by Mrs Wilkinson of Chesfield Park, Herts, in June 1886, EMF’, cloth faded, inner hinges cracked but remaining firm, front free endpaper pasted to front pastedown, crude presumably juvenile hand-colouring to a number of illustrations;
Baring, Maurice. An Outline of Russian Literature. London: Williams & Norgate, c.1915 or later. 8vo, original cloth, printed book-label, ‘This book belongs to E. M. Forster’, to front pastedown, pencilled annotations by Forster listing Russian authors and their works to rear free endpaper and rear pastedown, front inner hinge cracked between series-title and title-page with webbing visible;
Baedeker, Karl. The Rhine from the Dutch to the Alsatian Frontier. Handbook for Travellers. Eighteenth Revised Edition. Leipzig: Karl Baedeker, 1926. 8vo, original red cloth, folding maps, ownership inscription ‘E. M. Forster, Frankfurt, Dec. 1928' to half-title, pp. 157-160 loose;
Collins, Wilkie. The Moonstone. London: Chatto & Windus, 1902. 8vo, original wrappers, ownership inscription ‘E. M. Forster’ to head of front wrapper, front wrapper detached, rear wrapper chipped and reattached to final advertisement leaf
[W. Heffer & Sons Limited, This Book Belongs to E. M. Forster, 1971, catalogue numbers 179, 27, N/A, 71] (4)
Footnote
A fascinating group offering a microcosm of Forster's reading from his Victorian childhood to his literary pomp as, among other things, an advocate of the Russian canon as it was first becoming widely available in English translation. As a boy, Forster lived with his mother at Rooksnest in Hertfordshire, ‘a modestly beautiful house which was the model for Howards End’ (ODNB), where the family were tenants of the Lieutenant-Colonel Robert Hindley Wilkinson and his wife Caroline of nearby Chesfield Park. Forster discussed Maurice Baring's An Outline of Russian Literature in a 1941 BBC radio broadcast titled ‘Some Books: The Brothers Karamazov and Bhakti': ‘I have just been reading a short convenient handbook … Russian Literature by Maurice Baring, in the Home University Library. It is not a new book, and it is in no sense up to date. (There is scarcely anything about Gorki in it, and nothing about the development of literature under the Soviet.) So I recommend it with reservation in case you get it and are disappointed. But I do recommend, for it will give you a background against which to set your reading of Russian novels’ (Heath, The Creator as Critic and Other Writings by E.M. Forster, p. 255). A copy of the W. Heffer & Sons catalogue This Book Belongs to E. M. Forster is included with the lot.