pawle liam (1 Ergebnisse)

Hardcover. Zustand: Near Fine. Zustand des Schutzumschlags: Near Fine dj. Illustrated by (dj) G.D. Tidmarsh (illustrator). First Edition. [sharp-looking copy, minor shelfwear, light dampstain at upper edge of front cover; the jacket is very lightly soiled and a touch browned at the spine]. (endpaper maps) This "surprising, somewhat startling" novel of adventure and romance, set primarily in the "Meskhian Soviet Republic" (generally acknowledged to be a fictionalized version of Georgia, and in fact there was a historical region of that country, called Meskheti, bordering Turkey, in the very very olden times). The book, set in the 1920s and also featuring scenes in Paris and along the Côte d'Azur, was published as a jointly-pseudonymous work by an odd couple of the 1930s: William Edward David Allen (1901-1973) was a respected British historian who wrote a number of books about the Caucasus region (his 1932 work "A History of the Georgian People: From the Beginning Down to the Russian Conquest in the Nineteenth Century" is still in print today), and was also a politician with notably fascist ideas (he served a term as an MP for Belfast West before defecting from the Unionist Party to join up with his friend and political ally Oswald Mosley's New Party); his second wife, from 1932 to 1939, was Paula Gellibrand (1898-1986), a twice-divorced society beauty and model (and a longtime friend of Cecil Beaton, who photographed her a number of times), who is also known to have been the inspiration for "Serena Blandish" in Enid Bagnold's novel of that name. (I wonder if Allen got the idea of hooking up with a society dame from his pal Mosley, who was famously married to one of the Mitford sisters?) Apart from this single foray into fiction, Paula does not seem to have had any other literary ambitions; if it can be assumed that her husband provided the historical/geographical/political background for the book, then we might also surmise that she contributed the plot, or at least some of its elements. (And since she had quite a lively romantic and social life, it might be fun for someone with deep knowledge of the period to try and connect the characters of the story with their real-life counterparts, if any. I'm particularly curious about the "Jewish Commissar" and the "sadistic idealist Colonel Laughton," two of the characters mentioned in the jacket blurb.) The dust jacket bears a fabulous wrap-around "sketch map" of the Meskhian Soviet Republic (reproduced on the book's endpapers; see second scanned image) by British poster artist G.D. Tidmarsh, the caption of which makes reference to something called "the Palavani Rising"; I have no idea if that event had a real-life counterpart or not, but for whatever it's worth there is a Palavani winery and vineyards that's been operating in eastern Georgia since 1784! Never published in America, the book is surpassingly scarce, with OCLC recording just eight copies, all in the U.K. or Ireland (and I'd be very surprised if any of those still had its dust jacket).