The london venture

London: William Heinemann, 1920. 177pp, [12]. With drawings throughout by Michel Sevier. Original publisher's black cloth boards lettered and decorated in white, with the monochrome dustwrapper including Mr Heinemann's advertising to rear panel. Some toning throughout, otherwise clean. P. 19 erratum remains present. With the ownership inscription of Henry Williamson dated 1920, and a few passages marked in pencil throughout. A friend of D. H. Lawrence, and the basis for the character Michaelis in Lady Chatterley's Lover, Arlen was a society fixture who famously drove a yellow Rolls Royce, though he was often regarded with some suspicion due to his foreign birth. The London Venture is a collection of revised essays initially published in The New Age magazine as The London Papers. Later in his career he wrote a cheque to an up-and-coming Noel Coward, securing the run of The vortex, which made Coward's name. Williamson was a fan of Michaelis, featuring him and his Rolls Royce briefly in Devon Holiday (1935). Henry Williamson (1895-1977), novelist and writer on natural history and the English countryside, is predominantly remembered as the author of Tarka the Otter (1927) for which he won the Hawthornden Prize. His wartime experiences on the Western Front having altered his life inexorably, he spent the remainder of his post-war life in Devon, Norfolk and Suffolk, writing naturalistic novels very much in the romantic tradition. . First edition. 8vo.