Back to Methuselah: A Metabiological Pentateuch

INSCRIBED TO PINERO

SHAW, [George] Bernard. Back to Methuselah: A Metabiological Pentateuch. 8vo, original cloth, fore and bottom edges uncut. London: Constable and Company, 1921.

First English Edition. Significant inscribed copies in dust wrapper are scarce. Shaw's series of plays were published in London 22 days after the American edition, an edition whose misprints irritated the author. A significant association copy, presented one day before publication to one of the leading playwrights of the late Victorian and early Edwardian eras, inscribed on half-title: "To Arthur Pinero from Bernard Shaw. 22d June 1921." The two were friends, but Shaw would shortly be critical of Pinero as he "preferred to notice only Pinero's failings, finding him too timid in treating social problems and accusing him of opportunism in the way he introduced and handled them. Shaw's strictures were accepted, repeated and expanded upon, in the 1920s, by Storm Jameson and Ludwig Lewisohn. Even-handed criticism did not come until the 1930s."-Jack W. Weaver and Earl J. Wilcox, Arthur Wing Pinero: An Annotated Bibliography of Writings About Him, in English Literature in Transition, 1880-1920 (1980). Shaw and Pinero were dual subjects of a Vanity Fair print in 1906. This copy has been in private hands since it sold at auction in 1960. WITH, AS SOLD IN 1960: Shaw's galley slip What a Playwright Should Do With His First Play, 1st galley slip, from The Author, April 1921. Laurence A159. The printed wrapper has a 3/4" split on each edge at the top of the spine panel, and minor wear at the corners. In 1/4 morocco slipcase. Laurence A161b. Lewis, Utopian Literature, 1516-1985, p. 169. Bleiler (1978), p. 178. Negley, Utopian Literature 1569. Locke, A Spectrum of Fantasy II, p. 98,