Books and Manuscripts

Graves, Robert
Good-Bye to All That
London: Jonathan Cape, (1929). First edition, first state (with the later suppressed passages printed on p. 290 and pp. 341-343). 8vo. 448 pp. With frontispiece portrait of Graves and seven illustrations. Publisher's salmon-pink cloth, stamped in gilt, light wear to spine ends; all edges trimmed; in original illustrated dust-jacket, designed by Len Lye, small chipping to spine panel ends.

A scarce near-fine and unexpurgated first edition of Robert Graves's classic memoir of the First World War, containing the two passages that were later removed at the furious insistence of Graves's one-time friend and fellow poet, Siegfried Sassoon. Sassoon was critical of several aspects of Graves's autobiography, including what he saw as Graves’s inaccurate depiction of his and other soldiers' wartime service. He took particular offense at Graves's description, on p. 290, of Sassoon's grieving mother's attempts to communicate with the spirit of his dead younger brother Hano, as well as Grave's unauthorized inclusion of Sassoon's poem, on pp. 341-343. Soon after the book's publication, Sassoon arranged with publisher Jonathan Cape to have these passages removed in all the remaining unissued copies.