Black leather binding with gilt title on the spine and front board.

We provide an in-depth photographic presentation of this item to stimulate your feeling and touch. More traditional book descriptions are immediately available

• Note : This book carries a £5.00 discount to those that subscribe to the F.B.A. mailing list

Being 1150 Poems and Extracts by 300 Authors

For conditions, please view our photographs. A nice clean rare copy from the library gathered by the famous Cambridge Don, computer scientist, food and wine connoisseur, Jack Arnold LANG. A comprehensive collection of poems and extracts by 300 notable English authors, including Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Charles Mackay, John Milton, and Geoffrey Chaucer. This book was the personal property of Jack’s father.

Robert Maynard Leonard (10 May 1869 – 13 July 1941), sometimes credited as R. Maynard Leonard, was an English journalist, editor, and light poet, the editor of many anthologies of English verse. The Leonards were a family of merchants long established in Bristol, dealing in rope and twine, tobacco, iron, paint, and wagons. Leonard was the son of the Rev. Henry Charles Leonard, Baptist minister of Boxmoor, Hemel Hempstead, Hertfordshire. He was educated at Amersham Hall and University College, Bristol.  After completing his education, Leonard became a journalist and worked for The Pall Mall Gazette, The Westminster Gazette, and other papers. In 1898, he founded the Cold Storage and Ice Association, of which he was Secretary, and also established Cold Storage and Ice Trades Review, of which he was editor. In 1900, on the strength of this, he was elected as an Associate of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers. He was also a member of the Institute of Journalists.

Leonard’s anthologies of verse began with The Dog in British Poetry (1893). The popularity of his A Book of Light Verse, published by Henry Frowde in 1910, quickly led on to The Pageant of English Poetry and The Pageant of English Prose for the Oxford University Press, which also commissioned a series of collections of specialist verse under the title Oxford Garlands, published between 1914 and 1915. Many of these works went into several editions.

In 1898, at Holborn, R. M. Leonard married Amy Fagg. They had two sons, Julian Maynard and Antony Maynard, and a daughter, Ruth Maynard, and settled at The Larches, Purley, Surrey. After the University of London, Leonard’s son Julian Maynard Leonard (1907–1978) joined and eventually became a partner in Carless, Capel & Leonard, the long-established Bristol oil refinery of his great uncles John Hare Leonard and William Leonard, at one time the leading British oil distillery. In 1893, the company had applied unsuccessfully to trademark the word Petrol. Neither brother had a son, and in 1916 William Leonard was searching for an heir and chose Julian Maynard Leonard. Antony Maynard Leonard joined the Royal Air Force Volunteer Reserve and in July 1943 was promoted to pilot officer. He was killed in action on the night of 26 November 1943, when his plane was attacked by a German fighter and brought down near Frankfurt. Leonard died at home, 37, The Pryors, Hampstead, on 13 July 1941.