The Gloucester Notebook

This facsimile of Eliot's original notebook (purchased in Gloucester, Mass., when he was 21 and a student at Harvard) includes many of the Nobel Prize-winning poet's early poems. In Robert McCrum's informative and concise foreword, the reader learns that Eliot and his family vacationed in the seaside town in the 1900s, which contextualizes some of the coastal imagery found in these early works. As McCrum aptly writes about the significance of the notebook: "The manuscript in literature is a sacred relic. As common readers, we are not often in the presence of a great work of art so close to the molten instant of inspiration, the inkblots and crossings-out. Such literary treasures are precious and, despite the traffic in print and paper, astonishingly rare." Each facsimile page includes a transcription, and the visually appealing hardcover contains the first draft of Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," which memorably opens, "Let us go then, you and I/ When the evening is spread out against the sky/ Like a patient etherized upon a table," "In the room the women come and go/ Talking of Michelangelo," it turns out, also appears in the early draft. Admirers of Eliot will find this a riveting object to behold. (Sept.)