Presentation Copy to J. E. Brooks

Three Monographs [Cover title]. [Comprising:] The Lost Literature of Capri [and] Tiberius [and] Saracens and Corsairs in Capri.

Napoli: Luigi Pierro, Printers, July, 1906.

Price: $7,500.00


About the item

Edition of 250 copies. Each work with separate title page. Pp. [ii], [99]-151. 1 vols. 8vo. Presentation Copy to J. E. Brooks. Original blue grey wrappers. Cloth folding slipcase. Esher bookplate. Woolf A10.

Item #345616

Three Monographs consists of the fourth, fifth and sixth of the Capri pamphlets, issued anonymously by Douglas, with a separate title page for each monograph and paginated continuously.
Inscribed on the first title page, “To J.E. Brooks from Norman Douglas”, and with numerous autograph corrections in the text, chiefly correcting typographical errors and occasionally striking a word. At p. 113, is written “Omit?” beside item 26, which reads, “Municipal and other Archives of Capri have been sold as waste paper so often, that nothing remains of them.” The topic is covered in item 12.

J. E. Brooks was the husband of “painter and lesbian icon” Romaine Brooks. He had known Somerset Maugham since student days in Heidelberg and they shared for a time the Villa
Cercola. “Capri in particular at this time was a haven for wealthy British homosexual men, particularly artists and writers, who were avoiding Britain in the wake of Oscar Wilde's trial, and here from 1899 onward she met such writers as Somerset Maugham and E. F. Benson, as well as John Ellingham Brooks (1863-1929), with whom she struck up a friendship. … She married Brooks on Capri on 13 June 1903, thereby incidentally acquiring British citizenship” (ODNB). The marriage lasted only a year but she settled an income on him.
“Brooks may have served as the original of Mr. Ernest Eames” in South Wind (Edward Nehls, D.H. Lawrence: a composite biography, 1958). In ‘Looking Back’, Maugham identifies the young man who was the basis for Hayward as “Ellingham” (see R.L. Calder, W. Somerset Maugham and the Quest for Freedom, London: Heinemann, 1972, p. 100). Douglas dedicated his privately printed Birds and Beasts of the Greek Anthology (1927) to Brooks.
Reginald Baliol Brett, second Viscount Esher (1852-1930) was a statesman and intimate of the court of Queen Victoria and a longtime member of public committees and behind-the-scenes “fixer”.
This is a superior copy with distinguished provenance.