£350
FIRST EDITION, PRESENTATION COPY WITH MS POEM, 8vo, pp. 32 + colour frontispiece. Original white boards backed in red cloth, spine lettered in gilt, dustjacket printed in black, brown and ochre. Boards slightly bowed, some tears to dustjacket with small areas of loss. Inscribed to flyleaf : ‘for Dunstan with love from Ruthven, 21.x.1945’, 14-line poem in Todd’s hand beneath inscription.
A presentation copy of Todd's poetry collection, the third book in publisher William Maclellan's Poetry Scotland series. Todd has warmly inscribed it to the American soldier and poet Dunstan Thompson (1918-1975), who published his first collection of poetry in 1943 and was a member, alongside Todd, of Soho's Gargoyle Club in the 1940s. The sonnet, with its reference to 'A moth caught in the electric flash of Europe's dynamos run out of hand' and 'The tall soldier' who 'wears the clothes they gave' seems likely composed with Thompson in mind, as the former was an American uniformed serviceman posted to Britain for the war; it remained unpublished until its inclusion in Peter Main's 2018 biography of Todd, 'A Fervent Mind'.
