BURKE, Thomas. City of Encounters: A London Divertissement. London: Constable. 1932. 8vo. First edition. Publisher’s blue cloth lettered in gilt to the spine, in the wonderful wraparound dust jacket designed by Gladys Hynes. A very good copy. The cloth clean and bright, slightly rubbed around spine tips and at corners, the red topstain still bright, the binding tight and perhaps just a trifle rolled. The contents fine but for a little offsetting to second and penultimate pages. The dust jacket unclipped (8/6 net), with several shallow chips to the spine head and around upper edge of the front panel, smaller nicks and some rubbing elsewhere, and at other corners, though a very presentable copy overall.
An insatiable guide to the myriad metropolis of London which unlike most guides, Burke tells the reader, does not offer hints to the historical landmarks of the city, nor the jolly list of touristic ‘things to do’, but focuses more on the Londoner; the eccentric, the businessman, the actress, the homeless… We meet the man demonically fixated by a gong in a Chinese outlet; the man who invites Burke into his dosshouse to view his tremendous collection of nuts and bolts, collected with great vigour from the many streets across many years, painstakingly polished and assimilated by this ‘collector’; oddities in taverns and museums and hovels all over. One chapter focuses on his friend and former classmate, Charlie Chaplin, giving insight as to his juggling of personal and private life, or ‘Charles and Charlie’. His earlier work, Limehouse Nights, was the basis of Chaplin’s A Dog’s Life (1918).
Of additional interest is the wonderful dust jacket designed by the Irish artist Gladys Hynes. Hynes is perhaps best remembered for her vivid modernist paintings, but she also contributed to Omega Workshops, the Bloomsbury design studio set up by Roger Fry, Duncan Grant, and Vanessa Bell, the collective anonymously producing furniture, textiles, sculpture and more. Yet Hynes was not only artistically radical—she was a pacifist involved with both the women’s rights movement as a suffragist, and active in Irish independence. This dust jacket marks one of only a very small handful of commissions in the medium.
BURKE, Thomas. City of Encounters: A London Divertissement. London: Constable. 1932. 8vo. First edition. Publisher’s blue cloth lettered in gilt to the spine, in the wonderful wraparound dust jacket designed by Gladys Hynes. A very good copy. The cloth clean and bright, slightly rubbed around spine tips and at corners, the red topstain still bright, the binding tight and perhaps just a trifle rolled. The contents fine but for a little offsetting to second and penultimate pages. The dust jacket unclipped (8/6 net), with several shallow chips to the spine head and around upper edge of the front panel, smaller nicks and some rubbing elsewhere, and at other corners, though a very presentable copy overall.
An insatiable guide to the myriad metropolis of London which unlike most guides, Burke tells the reader, does not offer hints to the historical landmarks of the city, nor the jolly list of touristic ‘things to do’, but focuses more on the Londoner; the eccentric, the businessman, the actress, the homeless… We meet the man demonically fixated by a gong in a Chinese outlet; the man who invites Burke into his dosshouse to view his tremendous collection of nuts and bolts, collected with great vigour from the many streets across many years, painstakingly polished and assimilated by this ‘collector’; oddities in taverns and museums and hovels all over. One chapter focuses on his friend and former classmate, Charlie Chaplin, giving insight as to his juggling of personal and private life, or ‘Charles and Charlie’. His earlier work, Limehouse Nights, was the basis of Chaplin’s A Dog’s Life (1918).
Of additional interest is the wonderful dust jacket designed by the Irish artist Gladys Hynes. Hynes is perhaps best remembered for her vivid modernist paintings, but she also contributed to Omega Workshops, the Bloomsbury design studio set up by Roger Fry, Duncan Grant, and Vanessa Bell, the collective anonymously producing furniture, textiles, sculpture and more. Yet Hynes was not only artistically radical—she was a pacifist involved with both the women’s rights movement as a suffragist, and active in Irish independence. This dust jacket marks one of only a very small handful of commissions in the medium.
