A very good copy in its slightly soiled jacket, with Marsh’s fine presentation inscription to Ivor Novello “For Ivor with all love from Eddie. October 1947.”
Marsh writes in A Number of People of meeting this “remarkably good looking young man” in 1915. “I should have been immensely surprised to be told beforehand that my next great and, so to speak, ‘influencing’ friend would be a composer of popular music, half my own age; but so it was. As usual, I was borne away on the new current, all my high-blown notions ’tost and fluttered into rags, the sport of winds’, and soon I was as much worked-up about the musical comedies at the Gaiety as ever I had been about the Stage Society.“ Marsh if he was anything, was a patron, and he was a constant friend and supporter of the young songwriter, introducing him to the actor Bobbie Andrews, who became his lifelong companion. It was through Novello that Marsh came to know Christopher Hassall, who in turn took on the role of recipient of patronage after Novello’s early death. Binding rather distressed, with some staining, fading and wear, but sound withal. Various proofing marks, seemingly not in Marsh’s hand, apparently in preparation for a later edition.
