The Splendid Wayfairing signed by Haldane Macfall first edition 1913

MACFALL, Haldane (1860-1928). The Splendid Wayfaring. London: Simpkin, Marshall, Hamilton, Kent & Co., 1913.

A first edition presentation copy inscribed by the author most likely to suffragette Frances Jolliffe, later from the library of Barry Humphries.

First edition, first impression, in the first issue publisher's purple moire cloth, richly blocked in gilt to the upper board and spine, with decorative green and white endpapers. 250 x 210 mm. xii, [2], 199, [3] pp., with frontispiece by Edward Gordon Craig and illustrations and decorations by Claud Lovat Fraser, Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, Macfall and Craig. Spine a shade faded, with a couple of light marks to the cloth. Webbing exposed at the gutter adjoining the presentation inscription, though the binding remains sound. Otherwise very good.

Inscribed by Haldane Macfall on the front blank in July 1914:

"To the pleasant comrade whom I took in to dinner, with the best wishes of the perpetrator and in memory of a pleasant evening when we kicked the globe of the universe about like a football, and decided that Perfection was the end of things."

Signed by Haldane Macfall and dated July 10th 1914. The front pastedown additionally bears the ownership signature of Frances Jolliffe (1873-1925), strongly indicating that she was Macfall's unnamed "pleasant comrade." Jolliffe was an American actress, journalist, drama critic and prominent suffragist, later serving as arts editor of the San Francisco Evening Bulletin and travelling to France during the First World War as a correspondent reporting on hospitals and refugee centres.

The volume subsequently formed part of the library of Barry Humphries, with his pictorial bookplate to the front pastedown and a further pencil note signed with his initials on the half-title. 

The Splendid Wayfaring is Macfall's collection of essays on art and aesthetics and was itself a collaborative production involving several important figures of the pre-war British avant-garde. The illustrations were supplied by Claud Lovat Fraser, Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, Edward Gordon Craig and Macfall himself; Gaudier-Brzeska and Fraser were working closely together at this period, and the book belongs to the brief moment immediately before Gaudier-Brzeska's death in the First World War in 1915.