Shakespeare's Boy Actors by Davies, Robertson

London: J. M. Dent, 1939. First edition (vii, 207, index, bibliography [208]), frontis and eight plates. Octavo, in scarce dust wrapper, blue cloth with gilt titles to spine, impressed decoration to front cover. Damaged dust wrapper not price clipped (10s/6d) skilfully preserved, laid down on archival paper and largely intact; missing irregular 5.5 cm piece from spine (which reads ‘W. / Robertson/ ...’), edges worn all around, faded. Binding and text are clean and bright. Davies’ first book, his Oxford honours thesis, reflects his early and abiding interest in play-acting and illusion. With the bookplate and from the collection of Duncan Guthrie, O.B.E., who served with British special forces in Norway, France, and Burma during W.W.II and who after the war became a leading fund-raiser for medical research and advocate for children’s health. “With his wife Prue [he] set up the National Fund for Poliomyelitis Research.... Following this, the fund supported many other aspects of medical research in relation to problems of disablement and funded the endowment of 13 medical chairs in universities in the United Kingdom.” Guthrie was, in addition, “a scholar of the stage and of English literature, for which he had a prodigious memory” and thus no doubt his ownership of quite a scarce book (The Independent, 1994).