Books

First edition, first impression, of Plath's first book and her sole poetry collection she lived to see published. The work was followed in her lifetime only by The Bell Jar (1963), which appeared pseudonymously. Seamus Heaney later said of The Colossus that "on every page, a poet is serving notice that she has earned her credentials and knows her trade". This copy is from the library of the influential literary agent Giles Alexander Esmé Gordon (1940-2003), who has signed and dated the front free endpaper March 1963, the month after Plath's death. Gordon discovered Sue Townsend and secured for Peter Ackroyd lucrative contracts for his biographies of Dickens and Blake. Gordon's engraved bookplate, seen on the front pastedown, was designed by his first wife Margaret Anna Gordon (née Eastoe, 1939-1989), the children's book illustrator who collaborated with Elisabeth Beresford on The Wombles series. Octavo. Original green cloth, spine lettered in gilt, publisher's device stamped on rear cover in blind. With dust jacket. Housed in a custom green cloth folding box. Spine foot bumped, faint spots to edges; jacket unclipped, faint soiling and splash marks, browned spine with shallow chip at head, short closed tear to head of front flap: a near-fine copy in very good jacket. Seamus Heaney, "The Indefatigable Hoof-taps: Sylvia Plath", The Government of the Tongue, 1988, p. 154.