Bookride

RARE BOOK GUIDE - THE RUNNERS, THE RIDERS & THE ODDS Specialising in Modern Firsts, Illustrated Books and Children's literature. No books on trains, boats, planes or Arctic Exploration...not this time. Be there or be square. 11AM- 5PM Saturday 22rd March. 380 Kensington High Street London W14. We have started another blog, archiving things found in... our warehouse, it's called Jot101 Worth a detour. We will no longer be posting at Bookride. All is not lost however -- posts are still pretty bookish! Check these out: Widmerpool says go there right away! Collectors of early modernist literature are well aware of the rarest of Ezra Pounds first experimental imagist poetry (Lustra, A Quinzaine For this Yule etc ). But this little pamphlet, a translation of an early work by the Belgium poet and artist Jean de Bosschere is so scarce that it doesnt even get a mention in The Young Genius, 1885 1920 (2007),David Moodys monumental first volume,. Nor does it feature in other collections of letters from Pound. However, in the recently published letters to his parents, De Bosscheres name does crop up several times, though I cannot find a mention of 12 Occupations. Did the translator see it as mere hackwork done to pay the rent of his bedsitter in Kensington ? It seems possible. He must have done a good deal of this sort of thing at the time. Pound was a famous talent-spotter and De Bosschere was just the sort of multi-talented. artist/writer that he would have nurtured. Having, in 1900 graduated from art college in Antwerp, De Bosschere paid several visits between 1901 and 1905 to Paris, where he met writers interested in the occult. From 1905 he seems to have supported himself as an art critic until the outbreak of the First World War, and during this period became an admirer of symbolism and of the mystic Catholic writer Paul Claudel. In 1915 he fled the Great War for London where he met, not only Pound, but also fellow Imagist poets like Richard Aldington and John Gould Fletcher, as well as D.H. Lawrence and Aldous ...Read More