High Table

Garden City NY: Doubleday, Doran & Company, Inc.. Very Good+. 1931. First American Edition. Hardcover. (no dust jacket) [moderate wear and slight bumping to extremities, one-time owner's signature on front pastedown]. Novel about a sickly, timid and anti-social boy who takes refuge in books, not just as a child but throughout his life, right up until he's an an elderly Oxford don -- at which point the war (you know, The War) opens his eyes to the limitations of book-larnin'. I've seen this described as "a satirical book about Oxford University," which is perhaps what occasioned its reissue in the 1980s by Oxford University Press in their "20th Century Classics" series. One online commenter called it "a very moving reflection on regret and growing older, on doubts and uncertainty [that] deserves to come out of obscurity." The author herself was the daughter of an Oxford don and was raised in that milieu. .