Prufrock and other observations

London: The Egoist Ltd. 1917.

First edition. pp, [4], 7-40. Lacking half title. Original wrappers, with a new spine. Housed in a new brown buckram covered box. Some slight chipping and wear to extremities and a little soiled and creased and with a black mark on the lower cover. Internally a little toned and with the occasional chip to the edges and corners but overall a very good copy of the collection which started the twentieth-century revolution in English literature. This copy was, rather romantically, lost for decades having slipped behind some bookshelves some time after the first world war resulting in the wrappers becoming detached and half-title being destroyed. This famously fragile book was recently rediscovered in house clearance and we have had the wrappers reattached with the new spine.
The "Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" first appeared in Catholic Anthology 1914–1915 edited by Ezra Pound although Eliot started working on the poem in 1910. Catholic Anthology was the archetypal "small literary journal" and it is unlikely that Prufrock was widely read. By 1917, things had shifted and even though Prufrock and Other Observations had a print run of only 500 copies, Eliot's first published collection found an audience. Here was a new modernist idiom and aesthetic combining existential bleakness and literary allusion. Eliot's collection was a self-conscious renewing of tradition in world shaken loose from its moorings. Literature had been made new.