Good, lacking dust jacket, spine sunned and lower edge of front cover very lightly marked, leaning to text block. Signatures of ’David Stewart, September ‘39’ and Ian Angus neatly penned on ffep, pages otherwise lightly browned and unblemished.
Later condensed into the much-republished ABC of Reading, this far rarer book by Pound is a more personal and idiosyncratically ill-tempered overview of literature and the practice of good reading. Offering a literary curriculum in the guise of a ‘vaccine’ to inoculate against modern taste, Pound defines ‘the minimum basis for a sound and liberal education in letters’ as covering the works of Confucius, Homer, Ovid, the Provençal troubadours, Dante, Villon, Voltaire, Stendhal, Flaubert and Rimbaud. The sharply dismissive edge of Pound’s opinion can be indicated by his concluding remark that ‘Milton got into a mess trying to write English as if it were Latin’.
