The Land. by SACKVILLE-WEST, Vita - 1926

London: William Heinemann Ltd,, 1926. A rare special issue copy, with excellent provenance First edition, first impression, signed by the author on the title page and presented to her mother, Lady Sackville, inherited by Sackville-West in 1936, and thereafter presented to the photographer Gisèle Freund, inscribed on the front free endpaper, "Gisèlle Freund from V. Sackville-West. Sissinghurst, July 4. 1949". This copy is from a special issue, unrecorded by the bibliographers, reserved for Sackville-West for presentation. Though it shares many similarities with the trade issue, it is embellished with four woodcuts designed for the signed limited issue, each signed by the artist, George Plank (1883-1965), and in each case the price has been die-cut from the jacket spine. The front flap of the present copy is inscribed by Lady Sackville, who notes, next to Plank's credit for the jacket design, that "the woodcuts of the 4 seasons are also by him. The fine woodcut of the wrapper is generally stuck inside the book". Sackville-West inherited this copy after her mother's death in 1936. She seems to have removed her mother's landscape bookplate from the front free endpaper (leaving remnants and some slight ghosting), before inscribing the book to Freund on the same page. Gisèle Freund (1908-2000) was a Parisian photographer, now recognized as one of the greatest portraitists of the 20th century. She mostly photographed writers and artists, and in the 1930s she assembled a photographic pantheon, in colour, of early 20th-century writers at Adrienne Monnier's Parisian bookstore, La Maison des Amies des Livres, across the road from Shakespeare and Company. Her subjects included Joyce, Eliot, Neruda, Borges, Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and Samuel Beckett. She photographed Sackville-West at Sissinghurst twice, in 1939 and 1947; a copy of one of her portraits of Sackville-West is here loosely inserted. The notoriously camera-shy Virginia Woolf sat for Freund in 1939, though later regretted doing so (see Diary, vol. V, p. 220 and Letters, vol. VI, p. 351). Freund's portraits of Woolf are the only colour photographs of the author. Dedicated to the author's lover Dorothy Wellesley (1889-1956), The Land is "an ambitious attempt to write a modern version of Virgil's Georgics by celebrating the annual round of the Kentish farming year" (ODNB). It was a critical and commercial success and won the Hawthornden Prize in 1927. This copy later passed into the collection of the Rolling Stones drummer Charlie Watts (1941-2021), with his posthumous bookplate. Octavo. Original brown cloth, white paper spine label printed in red, fore and bottom edges untrimmed, spare spine label tipped in at rear. With dust jacket, illustrated by George Plank. With 4 woodcuts by Plank signed and tipped in. Bookseller's ticket to rear pastedown. Light bumps to foot of spine, small spot of sunning, minor browning to endpapers; jacket toned and lightly rubbed, a few faint damp stains, extremities lightly worn, front panel fresh: a very good copy in very good jacket. Cross & Ravenscroft-Hulme A13(a). Virginia Woolf, The Diary of Virginia Woolf, 5 vols, 1977-84; idem, The Letters of Virginia Woolf, 6 vols, 1975-80.