It confirms that copies had also been sent to other lawyers Oswald Hickson of Oswald Hickson, Collier & Co. and invites him to see pp.272 and 273′ which were Lee’s offending passages.
The handwritten note on Hogarth Press headed paper is addressed to Michael Rubinstein Esq. It is complete with the original memo sent by the publisher with the book, which Rubinstein tipped in and saved. The case was ultimately heard in the High Court on 18 July 1960 and resulted in Lee himself paying substantial libel damages, and the libellous words and passages in the book being amended or deleted in subsequent printings.Īs such, Rubinstein’s own specimen copy’ is the original damning evidence’ on which the case rested. This copy, was sent on New Year’s Eve 1959 by publishers Hogarth Press to the eminent’publishing specialist’ lawyer Michael Rubinstein when they realised they had – courtesy of Laurie Lee’s creative memory’ – a libel case to answer, given the story about the fire at the Piano Works on page 272. A near fine copy (a little foxing to the page edge) in near fine wrapper with a little loss to corners. ‘Happily, the book has grown during its long intervals: not only between Lee’s post- first-world-war childhood and his writing about it in the late 1950s, but between both those times and now.A first edition, first printing published by the Hogarth Press in 1959. Part-memoir, part-sharp-sided polemic that is potentially darker than the bucolic idyll you might imagine, this is a work that continues to stand as one of the great novels of the last century. In some ways, Cider with Rosie is one of those books at risk of invisibility through sheer, apparent familiarity, but this month we invite you to drink deep from a fine work you always promised yourself you’d read. Bates’ lusty, rustic ‘Larkin’ books to adverts for Hovis bread.
Well-known and equally well-loved, echoes of Cider with Rosie exist everywhere from the cornflower skies in Grahame Swift’s Waterland and H.E. This is a place of bare feet, untrammelled woods and quiet lanes untroubled by cars. Lee’s account of his early childhood in a small, backwater country village in the Cotswold’s is a classic memoir of times past already on the wane and now gone beyond memory. ‘She was an artist, a light-giver, and an original, and she never for a moment knew it.’ Laurie Lee’s deft but sublime summarisation of his mother tells you all you need to know about one of the great masters of our language.
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