Cider with Rosie — The Folio Society | Laurie Lee | 2003 | Slipcase | Fine

A boy is set down in long grass on a June morning in 1918, and the grass is taller than he is, and that is where one of the finest English memoirs of the last century begins.

Laurie Lee wrote Cider with Rosie in 1959, looking back nearly forty years to a childhood in the Slad valley in Gloucestershire — a household of women, a village still lit by candles and drawn by horses, and a way of living that was already vanishing as he wrote about it. What lifts it above nostalgia is the prose. Lee was a poet first, and the book is full of sentences that stop you where you stand. It is also very funny, and every so often abruptly dark. The village he describes had murders in it as well as haymaking.

The Folio Society edition brings the text together with an introduction by Valerie Grove, Lee's biographer, who knew the ground and the man well enough to place the book properly in his life. Peter Bailey supplies the illustrations — loose pen and watercolour work, done with a light hand, and a very good match for Lee's own way of catching a scene in a few strokes.

Quarter-bound in pale green-grey cloth with cream paper to the front board carrying a design in colour by Bailey, cream endleaves, and set in Walbaum type. It comes in the original dark blue slipcase with Bailey's harvest scene wrapping around it. Issued without a dust jacket, as all Folio Society volumes are. Second impression of the 2003 setting.

Condition is Fine, book and slipcase alike. No fading to the spine, which is the usual complaint with Folio volumes of this age and worth stating plainly. The spine lettering is crisp and unrubbed, the boards are clean and square, the binding is tight, and the page block is bright with no spotting. No inscriptions, names or bookplates. The slipcase is unrubbed at the edges with no bumping to the corners and no sunning to the rear panel. It has clearly lived on a shelf and been read carefully, or barely read at all.

This is not a scarce book and we would not pretend otherwise — Folio kept it in print for years. What is less common is finding one in this state, with the slipcase undamaged and the spine untouched by light. It is the copy you buy if you want the book on the shelf looking as it did when it left Wellington Street, and it is a genuinely lovely thing to hand to someone who has only ever read Lee in paperback.

Extra photographs available on request. Just get in touch and we will be happy to help.

Wrapped in good heavy paper — we don't skimp on that — and packed into a sturdy box so nothing shifts on the way to you, wherever in the world that happens to be. Kat packs and checks every parcel herself, and she is not easily pleased. The unwrapping ought to be half the pleasure.