Quack, Quack!

London: Hogarth Press, 1937. Early Reprint. Hardcover with Dust Jacket. Very Good/Good. E. McKnight Kauffer (dust jacket illustration). Small 8vo. Pp. 193. With four black-and-white photograph reproductions. Bound in gray cloth with black lettering stamped on spine. A bright copy but for imprint of a paperclip on one leaf and two sun-bleached spots, head and tail of spine, that were not protected by the dust jacket. In the photo-montage dust jacket that shows edge-wear, a few chips (corresponding with faded cloth on spine; lower rear panel, a small triangle spot the size of a chickpea mid-spine). Please see photos.

Laid in are four pieces of ephemera: three concern the 1977 sale of this copy by an Oxford antiquarian bookshop to author, Oxonian and career US diplomat Frederic Spotts.

. A 1977 invoice, TLS and customs form are typed on the letterhead of Robin Waterfield Ltd., "Antiquarian Booksellers and Dealers in Literary Property," and addressed to Spotts at the US Embassy in Rome. This book is appropriately germane to Spotts' interests inasmuch as he was the editor of The Letters of Leonard Woolf (Harcourt Brace, 1989) and, moreover, the author of Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics (Hutchinson, 2002). In addition to the bookseller ephemera, Spotts (presumably) has laid in a clipping showing an Olmec jade bust from a Yale Art Gallery publication, and a newspaper clipping in which a Korean protester holds a sign equating images of George W. Bush with primates, both using the same mouth expressions.

The publisher's "cheap edition." The photo-illustrated dust jacket by E. McKnight Kauffer remains a milestone in graphic design, juxtaposing angry fascist leaders Hitler and Mussolini with a Pacific Island totem, suggesting a channeling of John Heartfield or, at least, an absurdist Dada ethos. Withal, a witty complement to Woolf's broadside lambasting the political and intellectual demagoguery of the era. While not the nicest copy we've handled, we're pleased to handle any copy with the increasingly scarce in dust jacket. Dust jacket now protected in a removable, clear archival sleeve.

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