India's Love Lyrics

No Dust Jacket

Publisher Shipcase. Blemishes -- Rubs and small chips on case tips and edges (photo). Liquid spot stains on back panel (photo). The all-important colorful front panel is largely preserved and still bright colored, particularly given the fact that it is 81 years old.

Book. Blemishes -- Uniform moderate toning on all page surfaces and edges. The remainder of the book is Very Good condition. No marks or entries. Shaw's brilliant color plates are unmarred (photos). The binding is still strong and firm, the book lies flat, plumb, and square (photo).

Note: This issue is a Deluxe Edition, a rare printing with two distinct features for the discerning book collector to ponder. First, is the quality of the paper for a country at war and paper production was severely restricted. Likewise, the slipcase. Few slipcase publishings were allowed during 1942 - 1945 in the United States.

Publisher Comment: "The poetry of Laurence Hope holds a unique place in modern literature. No other writer has caught so vividly the dominant notes of Indian love poetry—its delicious absorption in the pleasures of the present- its out-of-door air- its melancholy-its poignant sense of the fleeting moment of love. It is almost inconceivable that a non-Indian could imprison in words this tropical luxuriance and Sapphic fervor so exactly and so beautifully."

Author: (edited from Wikipedia) Laurence Hope was the pseudonym of Adela Florence Nicolson (1865-1904) who became a popular writer of Indian poetry in the early 20th Century. Her biography is brief and tragic.

Her introduction to India came in 1881 when she joined her father who was posted with the British Army in Lahore.

Adela married Colonel Malcolm Hassels Nicolson (twice her age) who introduced to his bride his love of India's native customs and food. She would travel with her husband on expeditions disguised as a native boy. Tragically, her husband did not survive a prostate operation and Adela, prone to depression, took her own life by poisioning at the age of 39.