Scott-King's Modern Europe

London: Chapman and Hall, 1947.

First Edition. Publisher’s navy blue hardback cloth in the excellent and unclipped dust-jacket. Colour frontispiece by John Piper which is repeated on the front panel of dust-jacket. Without inscriptions etc. A Fine copy. First published in an abridged form in the Cornhill Magazine in 1947, the novella is “the story of a summer holiday, a light tale”. Scott-King is a middle-aged English schoolmaster, “an adult, an intellectual, a classical scholar, almost a poet” - balding and slightly corpulent. After twenty-one years as classics master at Granchester he has become a school institution, “Old Scottie”, given to  lamentations on the subject of modern decadence. He found his special subject for study in the works of the obscure poet, Bellorius, who had died three centuries before in 1646, in Neutralia, then a happy kingdom of the Habsburg Empire but now a totalitarian state in modern Europe.