Books

First US edition, first printing, presentation copy, inscribed by the author on the front free endpaper, "Miss Mary Telfer, with much gratitude, from C. S. Lewis, April 1957". Inscribed copies of this title are extremely rare: we can trace no others in auction records, and have handled only one signed copy. Mary Telfer was a nurse at Napsbury Hospital, Hertfordshire. It seems she was involved in caring for Lewis's wife, Joy, after she was discharged from the Wingfield Morris Hospital in Headington in April 1957; it is likely that she is one of the two nurses resident at The Kilns whom Lewis mentions in a letter to Ruth Pitter on 15 April (see Hooper, vol. III, p. 847). Telfer gave this copy to her twin nieces for their sixth birthday in 1957, and it remained in the family until 2024. Octavo. Original blue cloth, spine lettered in black. With supplied dust jacket, designed by Pauline Baynes. Illustrations to the text by Baynes. A little shaken and soiled, cloth lightly worn at extremities, a few partially erased pen marks to rear cover and endpapers, gutter cracked after front free endpaper with short tear to half-title, still sound; unclipped jacket lightly nicked and creased, small chip to head of rear panel: a good copy in very good jacket. Brown 62. Walter Hooper, The Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis, 2004.

The Last Battle is the seventh and final novel in the Chronicles of Narnia series by C.S. Lewis. The plot involves the characters endeavoring to defend Narnia from an invasion led by a deceptive ape named Shift and his unwitting pawn Puzzle, a donkey. The book weaves a narrative of the apocalyptic end of the fictional world of Narnia and serves as an allegory of the Christian belief of the Last Judgment.