Description
J. B. Lippincott Company, Published 1927. Hardcover, 318 pp.; 20 cm; First Edition (no later-printing statement on the bastard title, Lippincott's first-issue point for its fiction of this period); with a color illustrated dust jacket.
Rare, out-of-print & unusual books · Since 1997
110
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Catalog notes
Condition & notes
In Very Good condition with a Good dust jacket. Blue cloth boards with white polka-dots, white lettering to front panel and spine; light bumping to corners and mild shelf wear. Spine slightly cocked with a thin crack between pp. 112-113, but binding still sound. Light soiling to text block edges; traces of an erased pencil ownership name to the front free endpaper. Pages evenly toned with age but otherwise unmarked. Color illustrated jacket (Regency figures by a Romany caravan) is complete with several small chips and short edge tears (largest about one-half inch), some tape repairs to the verso, moderate edge wear, and light overall soiling. Now in an archival quality (removable) Brodart cover.A 1927 boxing novel by Paul Herring based on the life of William "Bendigo" Thompson (1811-1880), the celebrated English bare-knuckle prize-fighter; the title page carries an epigraph from Arthur Conan Doyle's poem "Bendy's Sermon."[From front jacket flap] A Romance of the Open Road, of the Long Green Lane and the Broad Heath, of Bendy, Prince of 'Milling Coves', and his Gipsy Sweetheart. "Half of him was whalebone, half of him was steel." Give him twenty-four feet of good fighting grass, thick with daisies and hemmed by rope and stakes, and, mufflers or mawlies, Bendigo would take on any milling blade who asked for it. Big Ben, the Deaf 'Un, the Newcastle Youth all go down till Bendigo's bonny blue birdseye floats high, the champion colors of England. Here is a tale of the long green lane, the broad heath and the open road, of Bendy, prince of gorgios, his path crisscrossed by a Romany sweetheart as gipsyish as the thorny briar that carries wild roses or the cruel gorse that gleams in gold. It's a fighting tale of the days when the London Fancy shied their white beaver hats into the ring and gentlemen whips matched coaches to the tune of "The Tantivy Trot." It fairly rings with sturdy blows and stirs the pulse with its joy of living, its virility and slashing style, and it will make a strong appeal to sportsmen as well as lovers of romance and the Romany roads of Borrow.