First edition. Crown 8vo. Pp. vii, 198, [2 (publisher's adverts)]. Royal blue cloth with bordered floral motif blind-stamped in gilt to front board and spine; fore and bottom edges untrimmed.
With the bookplate of H[arry] B[ates] Thayer – fifth president of AT&T (1919–1925), under whose leadership the company flourished as a regulated monopoly and spread into radio broadcasting – to the front pastedown. Until 2011, the primary dining facility at Dartmouth College was known as Thayer Hall in honour of Thayer's services to his alma mater, which included being on the Board of Trustees. Board extremities lightly worn, mild offsetting to endpapers, else V/G.
A collection of pastiches on a Christmas theme, perhaps 'the best in history', of Beerbohm's well-known contemporaries – Henry James, George Bernard Shaw, Thomas Hardy, Joseph Conrad, Rudyard Kipling, H. G. Wells, George Meredith, John Galsworthy, G. K. Chesterton, George Moore, Edmund Gosse, Maurice Hewlett, Hilaire Belloc, G. S. Street, Arnold Bennett, Frank Harris, and A. C. Benson. James, the first author parodied here, read A Christmas Garland with "wonder and delight" and called the book "the most intelligent that has been produced in England for many a long day." Max Beerbohm is best known today for Zuleika Dobson, or, An Oxford Love Story (1911), his only novel.
[Gallatin 10]