FREYER, Dermot. Not All Joy. London: Elkin Mathews & Marrot. 1932. 8vo. First edition, being one of a limited edition of 100 copies only, printed on handmade paper. Publisher’s green cloth lettered in gilt to the spine, edges untrimmed, in the delightful dust jacket designed, seemingly, by ‘Metassini’. An about fine copy, the boards very gently bumped to the corners and tips, the binding tight and a trifle rolled, else fine, the contents clean and bright. The dust jacket unclipped (21s net, ‘special edition’), and very slightly rubbed to extremities, faint rubbing to spine foot at publisher’s imprint.
A very pleasing example of this, the author’s only major work, a collection of semi-autobiographical stories posing as fiction, drawing upon much of the author’s life including the death of his wife from the Spanish Flu. In his early twenties, Freyer began working for the publisher Elkin Mathews as a reader, and it is in this role that gained him a little-desired bibliographical tidbit: he rejected James Joyce’s Dubliners, writing that ‘most of these stories treat of very lower-middle class Dublin life. They are never enlivening and often sordid and even disgusting… it is a dismal and depressing world, this’ (‘A Reader’s Report on Dubliners’, in JJQ, 10 (Summer 1973), pp.455-57.). The period jacket a joyful mystery. The design was used on the physically smaller trade edition; this limited edition scarce.
FREYER, Dermot. Not All Joy. London: Elkin Mathews & Marrot. 1932. 8vo. First edition, being one of a limited edition of 100 copies only, printed on handmade paper. Publisher’s green cloth lettered in gilt to the spine, edges untrimmed, in the delightful dust jacket designed, seemingly, by ‘Metassini’. An about fine copy, the boards very gently bumped to the corners and tips, the binding tight and a trifle rolled, else fine, the contents clean and bright. The dust jacket unclipped (21s net, ‘special edition’), and very slightly rubbed to extremities, faint rubbing to spine foot at publisher’s imprint.
A very pleasing example of this, the author’s only major work, a collection of semi-autobiographical stories posing as fiction, drawing upon much of the author’s life including the death of his wife from the Spanish Flu. In his early twenties, Freyer began working for the publisher Elkin Mathews as a reader, and it is in this role that gained him a little-desired bibliographical tidbit: he rejected James Joyce’s Dubliners, writing that ‘most of these stories treat of very lower-middle class Dublin life. They are never enlivening and often sordid and even disgusting… it is a dismal and depressing world, this’ (‘A Reader’s Report on Dubliners’, in JJQ, 10 (Summer 1973), pp.455-57.). The period jacket a joyful mystery. The design was used on the physically smaller trade edition; this limited edition scarce.
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