LEE, Laurie (author). Cider With Rosie. London Hogarth Press. 1959

8vo.; publisher’s olive green cloth lettered and decorated in gilt to spine, in pictorial dustwrapper with wrap-around design by John Ward; pp. [xii], 9-280 + [i]; with full-page plates in line by the same illustrator; a fine copy with slight toning to edges of book block, fine and clean, without inscriptions, internally fresh in a near fine, price-clipped dustwrapper with the smallest bruising to edges.

First edition, first printing, including the reference to the fire at the piano factory which was removed from later printings following the threat of a lawsuit. This volume of autobiography, which is followed by “As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning” (1969) and “A Moment of War” (1991). It is an account of Lee’s bucolic childhood in the little village of Slad, Gloucestershire, during and beyond the First World War, before the advent of modern contraptions like the motor car.