Barrack-Room Ballads and Other Verses.

KIPLING, Rudyard.

Item Number: 134217

Leipzig: Heinemann and Balestier, 1892.

The English Library edition of perhaps Kipling’s most popular poetry collection. Octavo, bound in three quarter morocco over marbled boards. From the library of Richard Edwards Bartlett with a typed letter addressed to him and signed by Rudyard Kipling tipped in. On Kipling’s Bateman’s house letterhead, the letter is dated May 7th, 1912 and reads: R.E. Bartlett Esq., Dear Sir, I am greatly obliged to you for your letter of May 6th in which you tell me what the British Museum authorities have done through your efforts, to catalogue Mr. Gerard Cobb’s musical settings. I did not realize it was part of the responsibility of the Museum to catalogue all songs and I should be sorry to add to their labours by having the catalogue the hundred of settings of my verse. Yours truly “Rudyard Kipling.” Here Kipling refers to his collaboration with Anglican composer Gerard Francis Cobb who set his popular poetry collection, Barrack Room Ballads, to music in 1892, including such well-known verses as “Danny Deever,” “Gunga Din,” and “Mandalay.” As Kipling indicates in his letter, Richard Edwards Bartlett later assisted the British Museum in cataloguing their copy of Cobb’s musical adaptation. Bartlett has added an extensive biography of Gerrard Cobb to the front of the volume and tipped in the handwritten sheet music that accompanies each page of the verse throughout the volume. In very good condition with Bartlett’s bookplate to the pastedown. An exceptionally unique example.

Written in vernacular dialect, Kipling's The Barrack Room Ballads contains some of Kipling's most well-known work, including the poems "Gunga Din", "Tommy", "Mandalay", and "Danny Deever" which established his early fame as a poet. The first poems were published in the Scots Observer in the first half of 1890, and collected in Barrack-Room Ballads and Other Verses in 1892. Kipling later returned to the theme in a group of poems collected in The Seven Seas under the same title. A third group of vernacular Army poems from the Boer War, titled "Service Songs" and published in The Five Nations (1903), can be considered part of the Ballads, as can a number of other uncollected pieces.