Antic Hay

First edition. Sm. 8vo. Pp. [iv], 328. Publisher's mustard yellow cloth with red printed paper label mounted to spine. With spare title-label tipped in at terminal leaf. Yellow topstain, fore and lower edges untrimmed.

Light fading along spine, some offsetting to endpapers, preliminaries slightly foxed, else Fine. From the library of author, literary critic and avid book collector, Clement K[ing] Shorter (1857–1926), with his bookplate to front paste-down. An editor of the Illustrated London News, Shorter went on to fount and publish Sketch, Sphere, and the venerable Tatler. He also edited Elizabeth Gaskell's The Life of Charlotte Brontë (1899), and authored four books on the Brontë sisters himself.

Hailed as Huxley's first masterpiece, a wickedly satirical "novel of ideas" set in London's post-war, nihilistic bohemia, which paved the way for his classic Brave New World, published a decade later. Book title borrowed from a Marlowe couplet. "[Α] delirium of sense enjoyment!" –New York Times

[Duval, Aldous Huxley, A Bibliography, p. 30]