£2,000
FIRST EDITION, 8vo, pp. 63, [1]. Original light brown textured paper boards backed in dark brown cloth, spine lettered direct in gilt, brown dustjacket printed in dark brown. A touch of rubbing to head of dustjacket spine panel. Ownership inscription of Richard Brown to flyleaf dated September 1944.
The only poetry collection published by celebrated novelist and nature-writer Nan Shepherd (1893-1981), best known for her 1977 work 'The Living Mountain' and recently but firmly elevated to the firmament of Scottish letters by appearing on a Royal Bank of Scotland five pound note. The nature writer Robert Macfarlane, who wrote the foreword to the 2011 Canongate reissue of 'The Living Mountain' that did so much to bring Shepherd's work to a new audience, wrote in The Guardian in 2013 describing 'In The Cairngorms' as a book which was 'first published 80 years ago in a tiny print run, and has since been almost impossible to find.' A reissue in 2015 (with another foreword by MacFarlane) made the text available again but first editions are rare in trade and generally scarce elsewhere as well - Library Hub records 7 locations: Aberdeen, BL, East Anglia, Oxford, St Andrews, Scottish Poetry Library and NLS.
