The Saintsbury Oration. Delivered . . . at the 95th meeting of the Saintsbury Club, 22 October 1979 Alan BELL

Wrappers. Edition limited to 75 copies; loosely inserted the printed menu/wine-list for the dinner (also including an inventory of "The state of the SAINTSBURY CLUB CELLAR on the morning of Monday 22 October 1979"), with a list of members - printed at the Westerham Press, cover featuring a wood-engraving by Enid Marx. The oration repeats the menu/wine-list and list of members, adding a list of members and their guests attending. Ian Parsons brought Lord Hutchinson, Alec Waugh Richard Usborne, and the speaker David Buchanan. The Saintsbury Club, founded in honour of George Saintsbury (1845-1933), journalist, sometime Professor of Rhetoric and English Literature at Edinburgh University, and author of Notes on a Cellar-Book (1920), first met in 1931, its founding members including Hilaire Belloc, E. F. Benson, Duff Cooper, Sir Gerald Du Maurier, A. P. Herbert, Vyvyan Holland, Compton Mackenzie, André Simon and A. J. A. Symons, and, Bell recorded in 2000, "it has continued to meet . . . twice yearly ever since. It consists in principle half of 'men of wine' and half 'men of letters', but the membership is much more varied than that would perhaps suggest, with diplomats and doctors as well as those of primarily literary background . . . Membership is restricted to 50, that being the greatest number that can conveniently be accommodated out of an eight-bottle (6 litre) impériale."