THE NORTH SHIP

First Faber edition. Original black cloth with gilt titles to the spine, in dustwrapper. A near fine copy, the binding square and firm, the extremities very lightly rubbed. The contents are clean throughout and without inscriptions or stamps. Complete with the very good rubbed and nicked dustwrapper that is toned to the spine and panel edges and has a few short closed tears at the extremities, the rear flap fold with very slight loss. Not price-clipped (15s on the front flap).

'The North Ship', Larkin's first book, was originally issued by The Fortune Press in 1945. This first Faber edition, of which 2000 copies were printed, adds another poem and a four page introduction by the author. Larkin was always disparaging about the book. "Looking at the collection today", he writes in the introduction to the reissue, "it seems amazing that anyone should have offered to publish it without a cheque in advance and a certain amount of bullying", referring to its "search for a style" and the clear debts to Auden, Dylan Thomas, and predominantly Yeats (invoking his "immediately post-Oxford self, isolated in Shropshire with a complete Yeats stolen from the local girls' school"). This may seem harsh, but the new edition includes one extra poem – the concluding monologue (XXXII), "Waiting for breakfast …" – which was written in 1947 after he had (re)discovered Thomas Hardy's poems. If the earlier influences obscured his own voice, Hardy's example served to clarify it. (Bloomfield A1c).