Reilly 253. 1st printing of the first reprint edition of Peake's first book, a collection of poetry. A trade paper original in card covers. With a Preface by the author's wife, Maeve Gilmore. A square and tight copy with bookseller's price sticker affixed to the bottom corner of the front cover. The crown of the spine is bruised, there is trifling wear at the extremities, tanning around the edges and a smudge to the top corner of the title page.


Mervyn Laurence Peake (July 9, 1911 – November 17, 1968) was an English modernist writer, artist, poet and illustrator. He is best known for what are usually referred to as the Gormenghast books, though the Titus books would be more accurate

Mervyn Peake was born of British parents in Kuling (Lushan) in Jiangxi Province of central China in 1911 only three months before the revolution and the founding of the Republic of China. His father Ernest Cromwell Peake was a medical missionary doctor with the London Missionary Society.





At the outbreak of World War II he applied to become a war artist for he was keen to put his skills at the service of his country. He imagined An Exhibition by the Artist, Adolf Hitler, in which horrific images of war with ironic titles were offered as 'artworks' by the Nazi leader. Although the drawings were bought by the British Ministry of Information his application was turned down and he was conscripted in the Army, where he served first with the Royal Artillery, then with the Royal Engineers. The Army didn't know what to do with him. He began writing Titus Groan at this time.

In April 1942, after his requests for commissions as a war artist - or even leave to depict war damage in London - had been consistently refused, he suffered a nervous breakdown and was sent to Southport Hospital. That autumn he was taken on as a graphic artist by the Ministry of Information for a period of six months. The next spring he was invalided out of the Army. In 1943 he was commissioned by the War Artists Advisory Committee to paint glassblowers at a Birmingham factory making cathode ray tubes for the early radar sets.

Shortly after the war ended in 1945 he was commissioned by a magazine to visit France and Germany. With writer Tom Pocock he was among the first British civilians to witness the horrors of the Nazi concentration camp at Belsen, where the remaining prisoners, too sick to be moved, were dying before his very eyes. He made several drawings, but not surprisingly he found the experience profoundly harrowing, and expressed in deeply felt poems the ambiguity of turning their suffering into art.

Four collections of Peake's poems were published during his lifetime; Shapes & Sounds (1941), The Glassblowers (1950), Poems & Drawings (1965), and A Reverie of Bone (1967). After his death there were other publications, Selected Poems - Mervyn Peake (1972), and The Rhyme of the Flying Bomb (1973), plus The Drawings of Mervyn Peake (1974) and Writings and Drawings (1974), followed by Peake's Progress in (1979).