Signed by Lee
LEE, Laurie & Edward BURRA [Illus.]~ The Voyage of Magellan. Signed by Lee.
First edition, John Lehmann, London: 1948
8vo., black cloth lettered in gilt vertically along backstrip; together in the pictorial dustwrapper (unclipped, 10s. 6d. net), illustrated by Edward Burra; title illustration and a further 8 in-text illustrations by the same; THE BOOK a very good copy, spotted and offset to the endpapers, a couple of spots extending to the fore-edge; the good plus plus WRAPPER spotted, particularly to the lower panel, browned along folds and to spine, light rubbing to the spine ends. The wrapper is protected in a removable Brodart archival cover. First edition of Laurie Lee’s play for radio, which was first broadcast in October 1946. This copy signed by Lee in blue ink to the title page. The BBC Third Programme was a national radio station produced and broadcast from 1946 until 1967, when it was replaced by BBC Radio 3. The Voyage of Magellan was one of its first productions, and chronicles one of the most important expeditions in the Age of Discovery - man’s first voyage around the world. The work, Lee writes in his introductory note, “is an essay in reduction. The three years wandering about the world are reduced to an hour, the breadth of the Pacific to a minute’s speech, while Magellan’s crew of 250 are reduced to a chorus of four sailors… the shape of the play is the shape of its story: a circle.” The book was the first illustrated by the painter and printmaker Edward Burra (1905-1976). Burra later went on to illustrate such titles as Edgar Allen Poe’s The Tell-Tale Heart, and Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (both 1948).
BINDING: Hardcover
CONDITION: Very Good
JACKET: Good ++
£250