Item Condition: Used; Very Good
Has slip cover.
……Introduction
At the beginning of Seven Pillars of Wisdom Lawrence gives a
summary of its complicated history: how it was begun in 1919, and
mysteriously lost on Reading station; then rewritten, but burnt by
Lawrence- with a blow-lamp, so it seems - after a complete
revision had been made. Eight copies of the third text were printed
in Oxford. Then Lawrence decided to make cuts, and a new
edition, illustrated in colour with artists' portraits and on hand-
made paper, cach copy with an individual binding, was issued to
subscribers between December 1926 and January 1927. There was
also an edition of twenty-four copies printed in America, ten copies
only being for sale.
Long before the subscribers' edition was ready, Lawrence saw
himself getting into debt. A hundred and ninety copies were being
printed, and the price to subscribers would be thirty pounds,
though to cover the costs of production it should have been almost
three times as much. The artists, who included Augustus John,
William Roberts and Eric Kennington, also had to be paid.
Therefore, after long discussions with Bernard Shaw, he decided
to offer the publisher, Jonathan Cape, a cut-down version of a
hundred and twenty thousand words, out of two hundred and
eighty thousand, for an advance of three thousand pounds. There
would be a new title and Lawrence would have the right to
withdraw the book whenever he wished. This was the origin of
Revolt in the Desert.
It was not the first time that an abridgement of Seven Pillars had
been put in hand. Lawrence had become friendly with Cape after
the publication of Doughty's Arabia Deserta, and through him had
met Cape's reader and the eventual literary conscience of the firm,
Edward Garnett. He sent Garnett a copy of the 'Oxford' text of
Seven Pillars for an opinion, and as a result Garnett soon found
himself preparing an abridgemnent, which in 1922 Cape was pre-
pared to publish. However in December that year the Daily Expres ….