A Find

 Feeling a sudden urge to have a classic poetry anthology by my bedside, I took a look in one of my local charity shops, and straight away found this beauty. I believe I already have it somewhere, in its familiar large format and in a later edition – but this version is duodecimo, printed on India paper, all 1,000-plus pages of it contained in a volume of no great thickness, the pages of which are edged with still-fresh gilt. The typeface looks pleasingly old-fashioned, probably a version of Fell, and this handsome volume – an edition of 1930, inscribed 'To Mary, with love from Maude, Sep.1934' – was mine for just £3. The original Oxford Book of English Verse, it covers the period from 1250 to 1900, and is edited by Arthur Quiller-Couch, aso known as 'Q' (though he was not, as far as is known, a spymaster). He states his aims clearly and rather charmingly in the opening paragraph of the Preface: 
'For this Anthology I have tried to range over the whole field of English Verse from the beginning, or from the Thirteenth Century to this closing year of the Nineteenth, and to choose the best. Nor have I sought in these Islands only, but wheresoever the Muse has followed the tongue which among living tongues she most delights to honour. To bring home and render so great a spoil compendiously has been my capital difficulty. It is for the reader to judge if I have so managed it as to serve those who already love poetry and to implant that love in some young minds not yet initiated.'
According to Wikipedia, this India-paper edition was carried around the Empire by poetry-loving Brits, and was a popular 'knapsack book' among the military. 'Q' later revised the 1900 edition considerably, thinning out the late 19th century and adding more poems from earlier periods and from 1900 to 1918. Anyway, it will be good to have it at my bedside, where it will join another India-paper classic, my single-volume edition of Carlyle's French Revolution, which I am now nearly halfway through.