Received Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls and poet and novelist Richard Church's memoir The Voyage Home. I was particularly interested in church because he was a friend of Ruth Pitter. About this book, she said "that peculiarly rich book was a kind of revelation, strangely memorable among the welter of new impressions we have to live with. It was the Imago brusting forth -- the Larva, Nymph, and Pupa we knew already." Of Church's two earlier memoirs, Pitter wrote, "Surely your works are remembered and love by many. 'Over the Bridge' and "The Golden Sovereign,' particularly, are English classics to me, read and re-read." I have the earlier books on order.
I don't care about it as a collector but as a reader: the spine is structurally perfect, the pages are almost perfectly clean, it's tight and square. The only problems are the missing dustjacket and what looks like a few small drops of splashed coffee and - probably mail damage - a couple of slightly scrunched corners on the tops of the end-boards. I've never owned a Gnome book before (and it is that and not the facsimile) and I'm amazed at the quality of the paper - really thick stock with no tanning and nobody's dogeared them or written in it.
