Lot 3
Eliot, T. S.
The Waste Land
Auction: Books & Manuscripts | 01 October 2026 from 10am | Lots 1 to 78
Description
New York: Boni and Liveright, 1922. 8vo, 64 pp., original black cloth over flexible boards, spine and front cover lettered in gilt, glassine inner wrapper, salmon-pink dust jacket printed in black, publisher's prospectus ('The Modern Library', 4 pp.) laid in, second half-title clumsily opened along top edge with marginal loss, otherwise unopened throughout, dust jacket spine-panel darkened, rubbed and chipped and with tape-repairs verso, glassine wrapper with shallow chipping to edges [Gallup A6a]
Footnote
First edition, number 261 of 1,000 copies, in the first binding of flexible cloth and with the figures in the colophon 5mm high: one of approximately 500 copies thus, this copy almost entirely unopened, and retaining the rare glassine inner wrapper.
According to Eliot's bibliographer, the ‘first copies printed’ had the correct spelling of the word ‘mountain’ in line 339 (page 41), whereas ‘in later copies the “a” has dropped out’. However, the high incidence of copies in the first binding and numbered within the initial 500, but with the text in the purported second state, suggests that the sheets, once printed, were selected for binding at random.