The Once and Future King

By T. H. White

First edition, first impression: London: Collins, 1958.

Original dark blue cloth, spine lettered in gilt. In the original unclipped dust jacket, priced 25s. net on the front flap. The jacket is typographic, lettered in black across alternating bands of light blue and cream divided by ornamental rules. The rear panel advertises Geoffrey Ashe’s King Arthur’s Avalon, and the rear flap The Sword in the Stone.

A very good copy, with a couple of knocks to the corners of the upper board and the top edge of the text block a little dusty. There is moderate offsetting to the endpapers; the contents are otherwise clean and free from ownership names or inscriptions.

The dust jacket is very good, with a few closed tears along the top edge, shallow chipping to the spine ends and corners, and some browning to the panels, more pronounced on the rear.

White’s reworking of the Arthurian legends follows Arthur from his boyhood education under Merlyn to the fall of Camelot. Its early comedy gives way, as the sequence proceeds, to a sustained examination of power, justice and human failing. The volume recasts three previously published novels as the first three parts of a four-part sequence: The Sword in the Stone (1938), The Witch in the Wood (1939) and The Ill-Made Knight (1940). The second and third had first appeared in New York. The sequence is completed by The Candle in the Wind, published here for the first time. As the front flap records, The Sword in the Stone was revised, incorporating two new chapters, and The Witch in the Wood was rewritten and retitled The Queen of Air and Darkness, while The Ill-Made Knight was left largely unaltered. In the flap text White describes the Matter of Britain as a subject he had “had on my hands for twenty years”. Lerner and Loewe’s musical Camelot (1960), drawing chiefly on the final two books, was filmed in 1967. Disney adapted The Sword in the Stone as an animated film in 1963.