"HIS TRULY 'ENGLISH' TALENT FOR SYMPATHETICALLY CONVEYING ECCENTRIC CHARACTERS PERFECTLY SUITED THE AGE": TEN-VOLUME SET OF IAN HAY'S COMIC NOVELS, SIGNED BY HIM

HAY, Ian (pseudonym of BEITH, John Hay). The Writings. Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1921. Ten volumes. Octavo, publisher's three-quarter black pebbled morocco gilt, raised bands, marbled boards and endpapers, top edges gilt. $1200.

"Argyll Edition" of the writings of "Ian Hay," the pseudonym of John Hay Beith, signed by Beith on a tipped-in leaf in Volume I, with color frontispiece in each volume and a photographic portrait of the author, attractively bound.

"Beith's first novel, Pip (1907), colored by early Manchester schooldays, was a bestseller and was followed by other equally light comic novels, among them The Right Stuff (1908) and A Man's Man (1909). With the publication in 1914 of A Knight on Wheels and The Lighter Side of School Life… his career as a writer was assured. His humor, gift for story-telling, shrewd observation, sentimentality, and truly 'English' talent for sympathetically conveying eccentric characters perfectly suited the age. In the First World War Beith served first with the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders, then transferred to the machine-gun corps… his best-known book, The First Hundred Thousand, was published in 1915. Written in billets at home and in France, it 'impressed upon a notoriously unmilitarist public the lighter side of Kitchener's army' (The Times). First serialized in Blackwood's Magazine, it became one of the most popular books of the period… Beith followed this success with Carrying On (1917) and The Last Million (1918)" (ODNB). All of these works are present in this set. After 1919, Beith turned to the theatre, where he found success adapting his novels to the stage and collaborating with contemporaries such as P.G. Wodehouse and Seymour Hicks; those writings are not present in this set, which is complete as issued.

Spine gently mellowed. An attractive signed set in fine condition.