LEON, Derrick. Wilderness. London: Heinemann. 1935. 8vo. First edition. Publisher’s cherry red cloth lettered in gilt to the spine, in the striking dust jacket designed by Ronald Grierson. Our copy inscribed by the author to the front endpaper, ‘to Margaret Penn’, and dated Christmas 1943. A very good example, the cloth clean and a little bumped to the corners and spine tips, the binding tight and just gently rolled. The textblock edges with some faint spots, the contents too with some sporadic foxing in places throughout. The dust jacket unclipped (7s 6d net), with several small closed tears, creases and gentle rubbing to corners and spine head and tail with one or two small stains.
A quite wonderful example of this, the obscure author’s second novel after his Hogarth-published Livingstones (1933). As the remarkable dust jacket design hints, the novel is one of ‘ultimate loneliness’, of several strained relationships, an insatiable existential hunger for meaning, and a (near) Senecan suicide as denouement. Derrick Leon, who made a living from interior design, sadly died of tuberculosis in 1944 aged just 36, his literary output three scarce novels, two sketches of Tolstoy and Proust, and a typescript biography of John Ruskin, which was posthumously published. It seems likely his background in interior design made him acquaintances with the dust jacket artist, Ronald Grierson, a multi-disciplined artist who studied at Hammersmith and later the Grosvenor School of Art under Iain Macnab; we locate only two dust jacket designs Grierson was commissioned to produce—for Leon’s first two novels. Grierson’s primary influences were Edward McKnight Kauffer and Georges Braque, and one can see those influences on the design here. The inscription’s recipient is very likely Margaret Penn, the novelist of three autobiographical works and close friend of Oliver Stonor [AKA Morchard Bishop] who was himself close friends with Arthur Machen. A very scarce book.
LEON, Derrick. Wilderness. London: Heinemann. 1935. 8vo. First edition. Publisher’s cherry red cloth lettered in gilt to the spine, in the striking dust jacket designed by Ronald Grierson. Our copy inscribed by the author to the front endpaper, ‘to Margaret Penn’, and dated Christmas 1943. A very good example, the cloth clean and a little bumped to the corners and spine tips, the binding tight and just gently rolled. The textblock edges with some faint spots, the contents too with some sporadic foxing in places throughout. The dust jacket unclipped (7s 6d net), with several small closed tears, creases and gentle rubbing to corners and spine head and tail with one or two small stains.
A quite wonderful example of this, the obscure author’s second novel after his Hogarth-published Livingstones (1933). As the remarkable dust jacket design hints, the novel is one of ‘ultimate loneliness’, of several strained relationships, an insatiable existential hunger for meaning, and a (near) Senecan suicide as denouement. Derrick Leon, who made a living from interior design, sadly died of tuberculosis in 1944 aged just 36, his literary output three scarce novels, two sketches of Tolstoy and Proust, and a typescript biography of John Ruskin, which was posthumously published. It seems likely his background in interior design made him acquaintances with the dust jacket artist, Ronald Grierson, a multi-disciplined artist who studied at Hammersmith and later the Grosvenor School of Art under Iain Macnab; we locate only two dust jacket designs Grierson was commissioned to produce—for Leon’s first two novels. Grierson’s primary influences were Edward McKnight Kauffer and Georges Braque, and one can see those influences on the design here. The inscription’s recipient is very likely Margaret Penn, the novelist of three autobiographical works and close friend of Oliver Stonor [AKA Morchard Bishop] who was himself close friends with Arthur Machen. A very scarce book.
