The Private Papers of a Bankrupt Bookseller (Signed and Inscribed)

3rd edition, following first publication in 1931 by Jonathan Cape. 307pp, with illustrated frontispiece. Presentation copy, signed and inscribed by the author on the front free endpaper, 'For Sir Edward Wilshaw with the author's compliments, William Darling, 1942, Edinburgh'. In blue cloth-covered boards with gilt titles (cloth is faded and mildly rubbed on edges, rubbed and rounded at corners and spine ends, mildly sunned around spine, text block edges darkened). Internally neat, clean, bright and tight. In its original, illustrated dust jacket (dust jacket is browned, rubbed at a little chipped on edges, minor loss at ends of a lightly sunned spine, where there are neat tape repairs). Dust jacket now protected in a Mylar wrapper, fitted without the use the tape of adhesives. The Private Papers of a Bankrupt Bookseller is a hoax, published anonymously but written by Sir William Young Darling, a Scottish politician and businessman, a Conservative Unionist MP for Edinburgh South and War Veteran mentioned in dispatches (and also great uncle of Alistair Darling, former Chancellor of the Exchequer). He told the House of Commons 'I am something of a publisher, and I am a bookseller', but these bookseller memoirs, although widely taken as genuine at the time of publication, are almost entirely fictitious - a collection of vignettes, told with genuine beauty and unreservedly, and amounting to a fascinating if disingenuous bookseller's diary from the early 20th century. Sir Edward Wilshaw, to whom the book is inscribed, was a British businessman who served as Chairman of Cable and Wireless Communications from 1936 to 1947.