First Edition - T.S. Eliot - The Confidential Clerk

About the book:

T.S. Eliot The Confidential Clerk First Edition, First Issue Faber & Faber, 1954

A solid copy of T.S. Eliots verse play The Confidential Clerk, published by Faber & Faber in London, 1954. This is a confirmed true first edition, first issue with both known issue points present:

• Ihad for I had on page 7
• Gallop for Gallup on the rear dust jacket flap

The dust jacket is unclipped, retaining the original 10s 6d price.

Condition

• Book: Blue cloth boards are clean and bright. Binding is tight and square. Pages are clean with no foxing or inscriptions. There is a neat red bookseller stamp on the front free endpaper (The Basement Bookmart, Carlton Arcade, Abercorn St., Brisbane).
• Dust Jacket: Complete and unclipped with the striking red and cream diagonal design. Shows mild tearing primarily small closed tears and light edge wear. Additionally, one inner corner of the dust jacket flap has been neatly trimmed (no loss to any printed text or design). Some light rubbing and minor creasing consistent with age.

Overall a respectable, attractive copy of this collectible Eliot title. The first-issue points and unclipped jacket add appeal for collectors, while the mild jacket wear, trimmed corner, and bookseller stamp keep it in an affordable range.

Ideal for T.S. Eliot enthusiasts or collectors building a modern first editions library.

Publisher: Faber & Faber Limited, London Year: 1954 Format: Octavo, original blue cloth with dust jacket

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About the author:
T.S. Eliot (18881965)

Born in St. Louis, Missouri, Thomas Stearns Eliot came from a distinguished New England family with deep Unitarian roots. He studied at Harvard, the Sorbonne, and Oxford, but it was his move to England in 1914and his eventual adoption of British citizenship in 1927that defined his life and work. A poet, playwright, critic, and editor (notably at Faber & Faber), Eliot became the central figure of English-language literary modernism.

His early poetry, beginning with the revolutionary The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock (1915), introduced a new voice: ironic, fragmented, urban, and psychologically penetrating. With The Waste Land (1922), a shattered masterpiece of allusion, myth, and broken voices, Eliot captured the despair, sterility, and spiritual crisis of the post-World War I world more powerfully than any other writer. Later, in the austere and deeply religious Four Quartets (19351942), he turned toward themes of time, redemption, and transcendence, achieving a hard-won serenity.

Eliots style is unmistakable: dense with literary and religious echoes (Dante, Shakespeare, the Bible, Sanskrit, and French Symbolists like Jules Laforgue), yet capable of sudden, haunting musicality. He believed poetry should be impersonal, an escape from emotion rather than its direct expression, and he championed rigorous critical intelligence alongside formal innovation.

Major works include:

• Prufrock and Other Observations
• The Waste Land
• The Hollow Men
• Ash Wednesday
• Four Quartets
• Plays such as Murder in the Cathedral and The Cocktail Party

Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1948, Eliot exerted enormous influence on 20th-century poetry and criticism. He shaped the taste of generations through both his verse and his essays (notably Tradition and the Individual Talent). Poets as different as W.H. Auden, Seamus Heaney, Geoffrey Hill, and countless others bear his mark. Even those who rebelled against him had to reckon with the standards he set.

A reserved, formally dressed figure who seemed the very image of the English man of letters, Eliot remains one of the most important and quietly revolutionary voices in modern literaturehaunted by the ruins of civilization, yet always listening for the possibility of grace.