The Viking Press, 1946
Price: Not sure
History: missing the title of Oldest Copy in the collection by a whisker (well, a year...), this was a present from grandma and one of my faves.
Look: it's thick, with a lovely "OW" on the cover. As it is both quite an old copy, and a thick one, reading is difficult for fear of damaging it. Which is a pity, because...
Introduction/appendices:...because it bills itself as a "portable libray" book - Salome, Earnest, the expurged De Profundis, a selection of poems, letters, reviews and anecdotes pack this into a book I'd love to carry around with me. Shame I'm too worried about damaging it. The introduction by Richard Aldington is pleasantly wry - calling him the "greatest English - pardon! Irish - writer", skeetering off the sex question as quickly as possible and criticising some popular Wilde myths in a way that does still make me think. It also contains a few brilliant 40's generalisations about homosexuality...
