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Cider With Rosie
London: The Hogarth Press, 1959. Item #06600
The Suppressed Piano Factory Passage - The True First Issue
Laurie Lee’s Lyrical Masterpiece of Vanished England
LEE, Laurie. Cider With Rosie. With drawings by John Ward. London: The Hogarth Press, 1959.
First edition, suppressed (withdrawn) first issue, containing the passage describing the piano factory fire (p. 272), later excised from subsequent printings.
Octavo (7 3/4 x 5 1/8 inches; 197 x 130 mm.). [1], [1, blank], [1-8], 9-280, [1], [3, blank] pp. Black-and-white line drawings throughout, including frontispiece.
Publisher’s original green cloth, spine lettered in gilt. In the original pictorial dust jacket, verso lightly foxed and with light chipping at head of spine and minor wear to extremities. A near fine copy in a very good dust jacket.
The celebrated first volume of Laurie Lee’s autobiographical trilogy, Cider With Rosie evokes with extraordinary lyricism the author’s childhood in the Cotswold village of Slad in the years following the First World War. A work suffused with sensory richness, it captures a rural England on the cusp of irrevocable change.
The earliest issue of the first edition - of which this is an example - contains a passage describing a fire at a local piano factory, printed on p. 272. At the request of individuals who objected to the episode’s inclusion, the text was suppressed and removed from subsequent printings, rendering surviving copies of this state distinctly uncommon.
Lee’s prose, at once nostalgic and unsentimental, transforms personal memory into a broader meditation on time, place, and loss. The figure of “Rosie,” later revealed to be his cousin Rosalind Buckland, serves as both muse and emblem of youthful awakening.
Contemporary reception was immediate and enthusiastic. As the Daily Mail observed, “there is hardly a sentence in it that does not set the senses tingling,” while the Sunday Times praised its enduring freshness and vitality. J. B. Priestley aptly described the work as “an exquisite farewell… to an England that has vanished.”
A highly desirable copy of the true first issue, increasingly sought by collectors for its suppressed textual passage.
Price: $850.00