Lot 584

STRACHEY-SENHOUSE COPY - François de Salignac DE LA MOTHE-FÉNELON (1651-1715). Les Aventures de Telemaque, 1720, vol one only (of 2), contemporary calf. Provenance: LYTTON STRACHEY and ROGER SENHOUSE (labels).

Estimate: £300 - £500
Hammer price: £200
Bidding ended. Lot has been sold.

STRACHEY-SENHOUSE COPY - François de Salignac DE LA MOTHE-FÉNELON (1651-1715).  Les Avantures de Telemaque, Fils d' Ulysse ... Seconde Edition conforme au Manuscrit original. Paris: Chez Jacques Estienne, 1720. Volume one only (of 2) containing Livres I - XII, 12mo (165 x 95mm). Engraved frontispiece portrait of the author, title printed in red and black, 12 engraved plates (frontispiece torn without loss, occasional light mainly marginal spotting and staining). Contemporary calf (rebacked, with some other repairs, rubbed and scuffed). Provenance: LYTTON STRACHEY (label, designed by Dora Carrington - see note); ROGER SENHOUSE (label and pencil signature on front free endpaper with some pencil annotation in his hand). Lytton Strachey (1880-1932), writer and critic, and one of the founding members of the Bloomsbury Group, had his last (purportedly sado-masochistic) affair in the early 1930s with the publisher and translator Roger Senhouse (1899-1970), to whom he bequeathed many of his books. These were sold after Senhouse's death at Sotheby's in 1971 and are now rarely seen on the market. Lytton Strachey's bookplate, designed by his close friend, and sometime companion, Dora Carrington (1893-1932), is found in two forms: small, and very small. The label in this copy is the latter, measuring just 27 x 24mm. Dora Carrington wrote of the bookplate in her diary entry for 20 March 1931: "As I stuck the bookplates in with Lytton I suddenly thought of Sotheby's and the bookplates in some books I had looked at, when Lytton was bidding for a book and I thought: these books will one day be looked at by those gloomy faced booksellers and buyers. And suddenly a premonition of a day when these labels will no longer [be] in this library came over me. I longed to ask Lytton not to stick in any more." Lytton Strachey died less than a year after this diary entry, on 21 January 1932; Dora Carrington, unable to bear his loss, took her own life on 11 March of the same year.

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