PATHETIC LIBRARY.

Auckland Star, Volume LXIX, Issue 120, 24 May 1938, Page 9

PATHETIC LIBRARY.

MARY WEBB'S BOOKS.

HIGH PRICES FROM COLLECTORS.

NOVELIST'S ORIGINAL MANUSCRIPT.

LONDON, April 30. Mary Webb, whose novels of the English countryside have become popular since her death, left behind a pathetic little library of shabby, wellworn books, mostly cheap editions, that in her lifetime would not liave fetched more than a few shillings all told at a second-hand bookseller. To-day. ten years after her death, collectors are paying £•> io jier volume. The books, nearly all presents to her from friends, have been sold by her husband to a Mayfair dealer. I hey were her daily companion. Passages are underlined, and favourite poems marked with a check. Notes are scribbled in margins, and on some blank are drawings she made and original poems.

j A Browning in tw«> volumes, bought I tor her by her mother's companion. Mrs. I Lyon** (the Mrs. Marston of "Priv-iou* IBane"). and containing a 12-line original |{/.■em by Mary Webb, lias already been sold for £30.

The "library" consists of Ifi volumes of poetry, four novels. three books of logrnds and romance.-, twn volumes of es-ays, four general books and a manual on play-writing. The manual i- profi-

tably one of the few she hail money enough to buy herself. It i- a cheap edition, and so fully annotate 1 t'lat it is considered proof of her intention to write a play. This, to.>. already >-old, fetching £!-">.

j Also in the bookseller's hands is the 'only Mary Weeb manuscript extant. It ;is of ''Armour Wherein He Trusted." an unfinished novel that death interrupted. Jit is written in a cheap notebook and on odd-sized sheets of paper, and illustrated with cuttings from magazines, I including a colour-print of four bees, ilifa size.