?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 3,500 - $ 5,000
INSCRIBED TO HIS MISTRESS, WITH HIS CARTOONS THROUGHOUT WELLS, H.G. The Great State. Signed and Inscribed to Rebecca West, with over 40 pages of unsigned ink drawings. The inscription, "RebeccaWest / from / H.G. Wells / 1913 / There are some pictures inside [arrow] / (Private & confidential / only to be shown to really safe people / like [Alan John Percivale?] Taylor)," on the front free endpaper. The drawings, mostly thumbnail-size cartoons, drawn on blanks, in margins, or in blank spaces before or after chapter headings, often expressing humorous and sometimes cheeky comments on nearby printed text, occasionally with holograph captions or dialogue. 8vo, publisher's cloth, fraying spine ends, moderate fading to backstrip, hinges cracked; some scattered foxing and uneven toning to preliminaries and subsidiaries including inscribed page. Later edition. London: Harper & Brothers, 1912; inscriptions: Np, 1913
Wells writes in his Experiment in Autobiography (1934) that often, "in the evening, with my writing things before me I would break off work to do 'picshuas', these silly little sketches about this or that incident which became at last a sort of burlesque diary of our lives and accumulated in boxes until there were hundreds of them. . . ." A selection of these "picshuas" were featured in Gene and Margaret Rinkel's 2006 book: The Picshuas of H. G. Wells: A Burlesque Diary. In the September 19, 1912 issue of the feminist weekly, The Freewoman, Rebecca West responded to H.G. Wells's new novel Marriage by attacking the author, writing that he "is the Old Maid among novelists; even the sex obsession that lay clotted on Ann Veronica . . . like cold white sauce was merely Old Maids' mania, the reaction towards the flesh of a mind too long absorbed in airships . . . ." Wells found this provocation too enticing to resist, inviting her to visit and discuss her review of his book. The result of the meeting was a decade-long love affair and a son, Anthony--mostly with the knowledge if not consent of Wells's wife, Amy Catherine Robbins. The pet names they used for each other were not sweet, but feral: "Jaguar" for Wells and "Panther" for West. Provenance: Rebecca West; thence by descent to Anthony West; thence by descent to Edmund West; thence by private sale to current owner.
