HARDY AT HOME: THE PEOPLE AND PLACES OF HIS WESSEX.

UK,8vo HB+dw/dj,1st edn.FINE/FINE.Neat,ink owner inscrptn to front pastedown,behind and hidden by front inner dw/dj flap,and price-clipped dw/dj.Glossy,b/w scenic lino/woodcut style,wrap-around artwork by Pip Moon illustrated dw/dj; with negligible shelf-wear and minimal creasing to edges - no nicks or tears present.Top-edge very lightly dust-soiled and minimally aged/toned; fore-edge bright and clean,contents bright,tight and clean also.Clean,black paper-covered boards with bright,crisp, stamped gilt letters to spine/backstrip and clean plain white endpapers. UK,8vo HB+dw/dj,1st edn,10-255pp (paginated) includes half-title,b/w vignette illustrated title page,b/w vignette illustrated contents pages, author intro+note on text; 17 chapters each with Pip Moon b/w chapter headpiece and a select bibliography. It is better for a writer,in Thomas Hardy's opinion,'to know a little bit of the world remarkably well than to know a great part of the world remarkably little'.This book is about the little bit of the world that he knew remarkably well - the heaths and river valleys and chalk downs of his native Dorset and the further horizons of the West Country that encompassed what he has made known internationally as Wessex.It is these landscapes,and the rural folk who inhabited the market-towns and villages in the years of his youth,which fed his imagination and shaped the distinctive elements of his genius. Michael Millgate has described Hardy as 'a child of the oral tradition',and perhaps,in England,the last and greatest of them.To read him is to hear a background murmur of older generations,a counterpoint to folk memories, parish histories,strange anecdotes and persisting traditions and customs from a deeper England than the new industrial Victorian scene,with its steam power and its urban emphasis. Nobody could be better fitted than Desmond Hawkins to capture the West of England grain in the texture of Hardy's writings.For more than forty years he has known Wessex as his home territory and has explored it and Hardy's dominant place in it.In Hardy at Home he has selected the main themes on which Hardy concentrated most expressively during his formative years,and has displayed this unique heritage as it accumulated and developed in Hardy's notebooks,poems,novels,letters,short stories and essays.There are 17 sections in all,under such headings as Rural Life and Rustic Speech; The People's Music; Law and Order; The Ruined Maid; Cider,Mead and Ale; Superstition and Witchcraft.To each,Desmond Hawkins provides a critical introduction before deploying a remarkable wealth of Hardy material.Alike for the specialist scholar and the new discoverer of the 'man of Wessex' this will be a fascinatingly intimate exploration of Hardy at home in the region that nurtured him. Since April 2013,again in March 2015,and in this year too,the UK Post Office has altered it's Pricing in Proportion template,altering its prices, weight allowances,dimensions and lowered its qualifying compensation rates too ! So,please contact rpaxtonden@blueyonder.co.uk ,because of the weight/value of this item,for correct,insured shipping/ P+p quotes - particularly ALL overseas buyers - BEFORE ordering through the order page!