THE DYER'S HAND

London: Faber & Faber, (1963). First British Edition. Hardcover. Hinges fairly neatly repaired. Very Good, lacking the dustwrapper. Bloomfield A45b: 3000 copies, preceded by the American edition which had a larger printing. INSCRIBED and SIGNED "To/Hedwig [Petzold]/with love/from /Wystan" in 1963 on the front free endpaper and with seven manuscript corrections by Auden in the text. Sensational association copy! According to Humphrey Carpenter in W. H. AUDEN: A BIOGRAPHY (p. 69), Auden's "first sexual experience with a woman was when he went to bed with Frau Petzold ... and in the later period of the friendship he seems to have regarded her as a mother- or aunt-figure."