The Gloucester Notebook (which Eliot playfully named ‘Inventions of the March Hare’ and ‘The Complete Poems of T. S. Eliot’) was the leather-bound notebook in which the young poet wrote down all the verses he had completed by 1917. This extraordinarily mature collection of work included the first version of ‘The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock’.
In September 1922 Eliot sold the notebook to his patron John Quinn for $140 and after this he never saw it again. But, unknown to him, Quinn’s heirs had, in 1958, sold the manuscripts of both The Waste Land and the Notebook to the New York Public library. It has resided there, in the Berg Collection, since that time.
Until now, it has never been reproduced in facsimile, and has only been available to view by academics.
This edition, with its transcriptions facing each poem, will delight any Eliot lover, whatever their level of interest in his work. The handwriting is beautiful, the pencilled corrections minimal, and the intimacy of reading the poet’s work in his own hand adds a notable dimension to the reader’s experience.