Notable Sales
SONGS FOR THE PHILOLOGISTS (1936)
TOLKIEN, J.R.R.
The first edition of the rarest book in Tolkien collecting, in a previously unrecorded state unknown to Tolkien's bibliographer. Privately printed. This copy is in an unrecorded state, with a mistake in the imposition: p. 28 is printed on the verso of p. iii and p.29 is printed on the recto of p.2. Correspondingly, p. iv is printed on the verso of p.27 and p.1 is printed of the recto of p. 30.
A very good copy, clean internally, with some light rubbing to the wrappers. Short closed tear to the head of the spine. Staples rusted and now re-sewn with thread. Blue pencil marks to final leaf.
An exceptional copy of a legendary rarity. Songs For The Philologists is widely considered the rarest and most difficult to obtain book in all Tolkien collecting. It contains 13 poems by J.R.R. Tolkien, written while at Leeds University with E.V. Gordon in the early 1920s. In the 1930s, Dr. A.H. Smith at University College London gave a typewritten copy of these verses to some students to print on their Elizabethan Press as an exercise. According to H. Winifred Husbands of UCL, writing in a letter to Tolkien, Smith had realised that he had not asked Tolkien's permission to reproduce the poems, and so did not distribute them. Instead the printed copies remained in the press room on Gower Street, where most of them were later destroyed in a fire. Husbands knew of no more than 13 copies that survived. It is now thought that 15 copies survive. Twelve copies are recorded in institutional collections, with eight in the UK and four in the USA. As a result, opportunities to acquire the book are vanishingly rare. The last copy that came up at auction was in 2003. In the 23 years since, only two other copies that have publicly come to market.
PROVENANCE: From the collection of Professor Arthur Brown (1921-1979), an associate of Tolkien. Arthur Brown's interests ranged from Anglo-Saxon literature through mediaeval and Elizabethan drama. He was a past president of the Malone Society and at the time of his death was one of two general editors of a series of Anglo-Saxon texts published by Methuen.