Montgomery Evan's copy of Ultramarine

Sale 1098
MASTERPIECES OF MODERN LITERATURE: LIBRARY OF ROGER RECHLER
11 October 2002
New York, Rockefeller Plaza

Lot Description
LOWRY, Malcolm. Ultramarine. London: Jonathan Cape, 1933.

8o. Original blue cloth, spine stamped in gilt; dust jacket (some light rubbing and soiling with minor wear to edges of panels). Provenance: Montgomery Evans (1901-1954, presentation inscription and bookplate).

FIRST EDITION. PRESENTATION COPY, INSCRIBED BY LOWRY TO MONTGOMERY EVANS on the front free endpaper: "To Montgomery Evans from Malcolm Lowry-33 Inglewood Caldy Westkirby Wirral Cheshire."

Montgomery Evans was a noted collector of modern literature who formed an important collection of Lord Dunsany material that is now at the University of Delaware. According to the biography provided by the Southern Illinois University, where his papers are kept, Evans "was a confirmed literary parasite, apparently amiable with the requisite iron stomach, and his greatest achievement was the relationships he was able to form in the literary world. Through his friend Hunter Stagg, an editor of a Southern literary magazine, The Reviewer, he obtained entrée to some of the well-known figures of the 1920s. Evans and Stagg together on a European tour in 1924 met Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, Sylvia Pankhurst, and Sylvia Beach and became friendly with Augustus John, Arthur Machen, Lord Dunsany, Walter de la Mare, and Aleister Crowley (to whom they often refer obliquely). For several years after, Stagg and Evans faithfully corresponded" Christies