The Waste Land
T.S. Eliot, 1922
ELIOT, T.S. (1888-1965). The Waste Land. New York: Boni and Liveright, 1922.

A magnificent copy of the first edition, retaining both the plain glassine wrapper and printed dust jacket, number 83 of 1,000 copies, first issue with the "a" in "mountain" on page 41 and with the number on the colophon measuring 5mm tall. “Eliot's Waste Land is I think the justification of the modern experiment since 1900” (Pound). 1922 was undoubtedly the annus mirabilis of the Modernist period, seeing the publication of E.E. Cummings's The Enormous Room, Virginia Woolf's Jacob's Room, Gertrude Stein's Geography and Plays, W.B. Yeats's Later Poems and the two undisputed masterpieces of the era, Joyce's Ulysses and Eliot's The Waste Land. Cyril Connolly gives arguably the best summation of the work: “Of The Waste Land I will say nothing but that we should read it every April. It is the breviary of post-war disillusion.” Connolly, The Modern Movement 43; Gallup A6a.

Octavo. Original cloth (a little offsetting to front endpaper); printed dust jacket (very slightly off center); publisher's glassine (minor wear at extremities); custom box.