A WRITER'S NOTEBOOK

Limited Edition: 349 pages, 8vo (235 x 160 mm), quarter vellum with blue buckram cloth boards, gilt gilt leather label on the spine, top edge gilt, others uncut, a fine copy contained in a parchment slip case..

 This edition of "A Writer's Notebook" is limited to 1000 copies and signed by the author.

 Number 125

'From 1892, when he was 18, until 1949, when this book was first published, Somerset Maugham kept a notebook. Part autobiographical, part confessional, this is a collection of Maugham's observations, confidences, aspirations and arbitrary jottings.  (https://books.google.co.za/books/about/A_Writer_s_Notebook.html?id=yABbAAAAMAAJ&redir_esc=y).

Posthumous reputation: Released from legal restraint there were those, including his nephew Robin Maugham, Beverley Nichols, and Noël Coward, ready to reveal Maugham's homosexuality, which he had kept from the public. This was partly a reaction to the hypocrisy of Looking Back and to settle old scores. Opinions as to his status as a writer continue to be divided. His detractors agreed with Lytton Strachey, who categorized him as 'class II, division I' (Curtis, 169) in 1925, and with the critic Edmund Wilson, who wrote in the New Yorker on 8 June 1946: 'I have never been able to convince myself he was anything but second rate'. Maugham in The Summing up (1938) complained: 'When clever young men write essays about contemporary fiction they never think of considering me' (p. 221). Yet his list of admirers was impressive, including W. H. Auden, Cyril Connolly, Paul Dottin, Christopher Isherwood, and Desmond MacCarthy. It was typical of the man that even in old age, with honours heaped upon him, he still believed he had not received his full due. The fact remains that he was one of the most commercially successful and gifted writers of the twentieth century, whose work remains in print in the twenty-first. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Bryan Connon. (https://www.oxforddnb.com/display/10.1093/ref:odnb/9780198614128.001.0001/odnb-9780198614128-e-34947?rskey=JoxabA&result=8)