[Limited edition (No. of 520 sets)] Piazza Press, issued to subscribers by Peter Davies, [i.e.1930]., 1929. 2 volumes, original brown buckram gilt, . Pp. (iv), 226; 227-453, top edges gilt, other edges untrimmed, with marbled endpapers. A fine set of a famous work. Manning, son of Sir William Manning, one-time Mayor of Sydney, was an Australian poet and essayist. He served throughout the war as a private in the King’s Shropshire Light Infantry. This famous work is the story of his battalion "from the time it is chewed to pieces on the Somme until, brought up to strength again, it is thrust into another vain attack". In "Men At War" Ernest Hemingway called it "the finest and noblest book of men in war that I have ever read. I read it once each year to remember how things really were so that I will never lie to myself nor to anyone else about them" and T. E. Lawrence said "No praise could be too sheer for this book.
2 volumes, small 8vo, marbled endpapers, original cloth, t.e.g., fabric ribbon bookmark,
Issued to Subscribers by Peter Davies, (London), 1929. 2 volumes, small 8vo, marbled endpapers, original cloth, t.e.g., fabric ribbon bookmark, glassine dust jackets, cloth slipcase Glassine dust jackets with paper flaps perished at spines, otherwise an exceptionally fine copy , in the scarce slipcase. Rare in such beautiful condition. First edition, privately printed, of the finest English novel of the Great War. One of 520 copies printed on handmade paper. In Men At War, Ernest Hemingway called The Middle Parts of Fortune: "the finest and noblest book of men in war that I have ever read. I read it once each year to remember how things really were so that I will never lie to myself nor to anyone else about them." The story of the writing of The Middle Parts of Fortune is a peculiar one. Prior to the war, Manning had achieved a degree of literary recognition with the publication of his collection of short historical tales entitled Scenes & Portraits in 1909. Pound, who became one of Manning's closest friends not long after he arrived in England, wrote "Canzon: The Yearly Slain" in reply to Manning's "Kore", both of which poems he included in Provenca (1910), & he was a great admirer of Scenes & Portraits, claiming to know the first paragraphs of one of the stories, "The King of Uruk", by heart. Following the war, Manning's health was precarious & his literary career languished. Then in 1927, the publisher Peter Davies (by a curiosity of literary history, one of the models for J. M. Barrie's Peter Pan) asked Manning to write some actual experiences of the war in the form of a short story or rather a short novel. Davies, who feared that the public's interest in war books would not last & knowing Manning's reputation for procrastination, lured the neurasthenic to London & shut him up in his flat for several weeks to write, not allowing him out, & keeping his friends from him. Davies took the manuscript from Manning sheet by sheet & set it in type without allowing Manning any chance to revise the proofs. When The Middle Parts of Fortune was published under the pseudonym Private 19022, a number of admirers of Scenes & Portraits claimed to recognize Manning as the author. T. E. Lawrence, later one of Manning's best friends, is reported to have immediately called Davies to congratulate him on publishing this masterpiece, asserting that the author of Scenes & Portraits is the only man who could possibly have written it. Davies adapted Lawrence's conversation for a promotional pamphlet entitled "Colonel Lawrence and others on Her Privates We by Private 19022", which accompanied the publication of the expurgated one-volume trade edition of the novel under its new title in 1930.
