SPENCER, Claire. Gallows' Orchard. London: Jonathan Cape. 1930. 8vo. First British edition. Publisher’s black cloth lettered in gilt to the spine, in the dust jacket designed by Mabel Dickinson Lapthorn. A very good copy overall, the cloth clean and bright, just a trifle bumped at extremities. The binding tight and square, with some light spots to the textblock edges, light offsetting to endpapers, else fine. The dust jacket unclipped (7s 6d net), with a couple of small chips and nicks to extremities, gently rubbed along joints, but a smart volume overall.
An excellent example of Spencer’s debut novel, what the New York Times called ‘a strange, glamorous tale of rural Scotland which has an atmosphere all its own’, about Effie Gallows, a young woman with a tremendous temper, adored, mystified, and later vilified by the inhabitants of a tiny village where all are born will die. This British edition, published in a much smaller edition than its US counterpart. It was chosen as a Book of the Month Club—which gave Spencer a sensational early literary start—while Time compared her to Thomas Hardy and Robert Louis Stevenson. Spencer moved from rural Scotland to New York aged 19 to pursue an art career, and was trusted to design her own dust jacket for her debut novel—due in dual parts to her marriage to the publisher, Harrison Smith, and in her remarkable albeit fleeting design ability—see the US edition was also have in stock. Two other novels followed—The Island, and The Quick and the Dead, the latter ‘touching a depth of disgust that is almost a spiritual nausea’, but fell into obscurity as per many modernist female authors.
SPENCER, Claire. Gallows' Orchard. London: Jonathan Cape. 1930. 8vo. First British edition. Publisher’s black cloth lettered in gilt to the spine, in the dust jacket designed by Mabel Dickinson Lapthorn. A very good copy overall, the cloth clean and bright, just a trifle bumped at extremities. The binding tight and square, with some light spots to the textblock edges, light offsetting to endpapers, else fine. The dust jacket unclipped (7s 6d net), with a couple of small chips and nicks to extremities, gently rubbed along joints, but a smart volume overall.
An excellent example of Spencer’s debut novel, what the New York Times called ‘a strange, glamorous tale of rural Scotland which has an atmosphere all its own’, about Effie Gallows, a young woman with a tremendous temper, adored, mystified, and later vilified by the inhabitants of a tiny village where all are born will die. This British edition, published in a much smaller edition than its US counterpart. It was chosen as a Book of the Month Club—which gave Spencer a sensational early literary start—while Time compared her to Thomas Hardy and Robert Louis Stevenson. Spencer moved from rural Scotland to New York aged 19 to pursue an art career, and was trusted to design her own dust jacket for her debut novel—due in dual parts to her marriage to the publisher, Harrison Smith, and in her remarkable albeit fleeting design ability—see the US edition was also have in stock. Two other novels followed—The Island, and The Quick and the Dead, the latter ‘touching a depth of disgust that is almost a spiritual nausea’, but fell into obscurity as per many modernist female authors.
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