First edition (just 500 copies were printed), cloth-backed boards with a paper label on spine, W Collins Sons & Co., 1922.

Henry Williamson's second book, consisting of thirty-two short essays, mostly concerning nature and the countryside. It was never reprinted in its entirety (various revised, altered and illustrated editions would follow, but one story, 'The Outlaw', was omitted from all subsequent editions).

Book condition: some slight rubbing to the bottom corners of the boards and a little wear to the paper label, but otherwise a very nice copy. Fore- and bottom-edges untrimmed. No dust wrapper called for.

On the back flap of the dust wrapper to the 'new enlarged and illustrated edition', published in 1933 (of which this is a reprint), Henry Williamson writes: '"The Lone Swallows" . . . represents both my earliest and latest writings. "A Boy's Nature Diary" was written at the age of sixteen, just before the Great War which engulfed the schoolboy-naturalist; the essay on the cuckoo at nineteen, while on sick leave from France; "The Nesting Boxes" and "Winter's Eve", at twenty-one, when the young old-soldier returned home a few days after the signing of the Armistice.

'After the Great War there was for me a vacancy on the earth, a sadness of vanished scenes and faces. The essays grouped under the heading of "London Papers" were written while life was still without direction in that vacancy (1920).

'In March, 1921, I determined to begin an entirely new life. I went to Devon, to live alone in a labourer's cottage to WRITE. On the Atlantic coast the sun was the only master and the only clock – newspapers unseen for a year – an immense belief in the present and the future – zestful happiness in a village where a motor-car arriving caused heads to crane from doorways, and an aeroplane passing in the sky made dogs run to cover, and hens squark scattering in terror.

'In that far-away time, from those far-away emotions, in the fields and by the sea, in freedom yet always with memory of 1914–1918 with me, were most of the essays of this book written.'

(For a further consideration of the book and the background to the writing of it, see Anne Williamson's The Lone Swallows.)