Façade. SITWELL, Edith.

First edition, sole impression, number 30 of 150 copies signed by the poet, this copy with a manuscript addition in her hand to page 22, giving the sixth poem its final title ("Hornpipe"). Façade is Sitwell's most important contribution to modernist poetry and the avant-garde. The poems were intended for performance: before publication, Sitwell recited several of them to family and friends in a private performance, over instrumental accompaniment by William Walton, at her home on 24 January 1922. For that performance, the texts were printed in a programme which noted that "all these poems, and some additional ones, will appear in a book called Façade which Miss Sitwell is publishing privately in a limited edition with a special frontispiece in colour by Gino Severini". Two poems are printed here for the first time, four were previously published in periodicals, and nine first appeared in the January 1922 programme. The first public performance of Walton and Sitwell's "entertainment" was in the Aeolian Hall, New Bond Street, on 12 June 1923. The audience included Virginia Woolf, Evelyn Waugh, and Noël Coward. The pointedly avant-garde premiere, in which Sitwell declaimed the poems through a megaphone, was met with bemusement and derision; Sitwell herself recalled that, afterwards, "I had to hide behind the curtain. An old lady was waiting to beat me with an umbrella." Despite the early condemnations, Sitwell continued to perform and revise the work intermittently until 1951. Provenance: Robert Lane Latimer, founder of the Alcestis Press, with his ownership inscription on the final leaf verso. The Alcestis Press operated between 1933 and 1938, specialising in Modernist poetry. Latimer corresponded with many contemporary Modernist poets, including T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and E. E. Cummings. Fifoot EA6(b). Octavo. Colour frontispiece by Gino Severini. Original red brick-patterned boards, rebacked in brown cloth, label to front cover printed in black, fore and bottom edges untrimmed. Boards a little toned at edges. A very good copy.