Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats.

ELIOT, T.S.

$7,800.00

Item Number: 145467

London: Faber and Faber Limited, 1960.

Later printing of Eliot’s beloved collection of whimsical feline poems which served as the basis for Andrew Lloyd Webber’s 1981 megamusical phenomenon Cats. Octavo, original yellow pictorial cloth, illustrated by T. S. Eliot. Association copy, inscribed by the author to portrait painter Sir Gerald Kelly on the front free endpaper, “For Gerald Kelly with the warm regards & admiration of the author of these verses and the illustrator, T.S. Eliot (O.P.)” Eliot and the recipient, Gerard Kelly, struck up a close friendship back in the early 1920s, and in 1960 Kelly was commissioned to paint a portrait of Eliot, which is now on permanent display at the Smithsonian Institute. Eliot has amended two poems with blue ink: ‘Of The Awefull Battle of the Pekes and the Pollicles…’ (line 6 reading ‘They will now and again join in to the fray’ corrected to ‘Or now and again they join in to the fray’) and ‘Shimbleshanks: The Railway Cat’ (line 56 reading ‘In the watches of the night he is always fresh and bright’ amended to ‘Through hours of the night he is always fresh and bright’). Near fine in a near fine pictorial dust jacket. Jacket illustration by T.S. Eliot. Exceptionally rare signed and inscribed.

Eliot wrote the poems contained in Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats in the 1930s and included them, under his assumed name "Old Possum", in letters to his godchildren. They were collected and published in 1939, with cover illustrations by the author, and quickly re-published in 1940, illustrated in full by Nicolas Bentley. Andrew Lloyd Webber began setting Eliot's poems to music in 1977, and the compositions were first presented as a song cycle in 1980. Producer Cameron Mackintosh then recruited director Trevor Nunn and choreographer Gillian Lynne to turn the songs into a complete musical. Cats opened to positive reviews at the New London Theatre in the West End in 1981 and then to mixed reviews at the Winter Garden Theatre on Broadway in 1982. It won numerous awards including Best Musical at both the Laurence Olivier and Tony Awards. Despite its unusual premise that deterred investors initially, the musical turned out to be an unprecedented commercial success, with a worldwide gross of US$3.5 billion by 2012. Cats started the megamusical phenomenon, establishing a global market for musical theatre and directing the industry's focus to big-budget blockbusters, as well as family- and tourist-friendly shows. The musical's profound but polarizing influence also reshaped the aesthetic, technology, and marketing of the medium. Cats was adapted into a direct-to-video film in 1998, and a feature film adaptation directed by Tom Hooper in 2019.