Limited numbered edition (320 copies bound thus), quarter linen, pictorial paper boards, fore and bottom edges uncut, Beaumont Press, May 1929

Book condition: some darkening to the spine, but otherwise an exceptionally fine copy
 

The Wet Flanders Plain, first published in 1929, has become a minor classic of First World War literature. The first trade edition was preceded by a limited numbered edition publshed by the Beaumont Press. Numbers 1 to 80 were bound in quarter vellum and signed by the author, illustrator and publisher. Numbers 81 to 400 were bound in quarter linen, numbered but unsigned. Both versions featured striking pictorial paper boards featuring ploughshares and rifles designed by Randolph Schwabe, who also drew the title-page illustration. This is one of the latter, numbered 86.

The publisher's blurb to the new edition published in 1987 reads: 'The Wet Flanders Plain is Henry Williamson's testimony to his experience of the Great War. . . . It is the account of a journey [actually of two visits] back to the battlefields of Ypres, Passchendaele and the Somme where the charabancs tracking the arc of the mine-craters and the tourists staring at the rusting howitzers prompt a work of elegiac reminiscence. Barely 19 years of age at the time of his call-up, Williamson's life was deeply affected by "the wraith of the war": The Wet Flanders Plain is the result of his desire to "return to my old comrades . . . to the brown, the treeless, the flat and grave-set plain of Flanders – to the rolling, heat-miraged downlands of the Somme – for I am dead with them, and they live in me again". Full of subtle vignettes, both of the progress of battle and encounters with other revenants, it is one of the finest memoirs to come out of the war.'

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