My Lady Nicotine and Margaret Ogilvy by J M Barrie - 1917 Author's Edition - Novels, Tales and Sketches Volume VIII - Antique Book

The 1917 Author's Edition of My Lady Nicotine and Margaret Ogilvy by J. M. Barrie. Volume VIII of The Novels, Tales & Sketches of J. M. Barrie.

Written by J. M. Barrie. Frontispiece illustrated by J. Bernard Partridge. Author's Edition, 1917. Charles Scribner's Sons, New York.

MY LADY NICOTINE
Chapter I
Matrimony and Smoking Compared

"The circumstances in which I gave up smoking were these.

"I was a mere bachelor, drifting toward what I now see to be a tragic middle age. I had become so accustomed to smoke issuing from my mouth that I felt incomplete without it; indeed the time came when I could refrain from smoking if doing nothing else, but hardly during the hours of toil. To lay aside my pipe was to find myself soon afterwards wandering restlessly round my table. No blind beggar was ever more abjectly led by his dog, or more loathe to cut the string."

Barrie tells of the comforts of smoking, and his travails in giving up his beloved pipe.

MARGARET OGILVY
Chapter I
How My Mother Got Her Soft Face

"On the day I was born we bought six hair-bottomed chairs, and in our little house it was an event, the first great victory in a woman's long campaign; how they had been laboured for, the pound-note and the thirty threepenney bits they cost, what anxiety there was about the purchase, the show they made in possession of the west room, my father's unnatural coolness when he brought them in (but his face was white) - I so often heard the tale afterwards, and shared as a boy and man in so many similar triumphs, that the coming of the chairs seems to be something I remember, as if I had jumped out of bed on that first day, and run ben to see how they looked, I am sure my mother's feet were ettling to be long before they could be trusted, and that the moment after she was left alone with me she was discovered barefooted in the west room, doctoring a scar (which she had been the first to detect) on one of the chairs, or sitting on them regally or withdrawing and re-opening the door suddenly to take the six by surprise."

Barrie's mother Margaret throughout her life remained distraught over the death of her favorite son David at age 14, yet she took solace that he would live on forever young in her imagination, which his younger brother James would use as the premise for Peter Pan.

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Condition*: Very Good. Lacks dust jacket, as issued. Green cloth gold-embossed cover boards: Sunning of spine, with chipping at the head. Small, faint white marks, front and back, appear to be surface soil and could be professionally cleaned. Inside: Bookplate on bottom left corner of front pastedown; light tanning of deckle edges. The unopened pages remain unopened.

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