First edition, signed by the author and with an autograph presentation note tipped in. When compiling W.H. Auden: A Bibliography, the librarian and bibliographer Barry Bloomfield (1931-2002) had written to his fellow-librarian Philip Larkin, in order to clarify a point in a review of Auden’s The Shield of Achilles by Larkin. Following the publication of W.H. Auden: A Bibliography in 1964 and a second edition in 1972, Bloomfield ‘mentioned to Philip that I would like to begin work on a bibliography of his published work: he looked at me somewhat mournfully and remarked “I suppose having finished with the whales, you are now getting round to the minnows?” but he gave no answer directly to my suggestions. [...] Gradually he came round to the idea’ (p. 2). Bloomfield – who assembled the most complete collection of Larkin’s works apart from the poet’s own – published Philip Larkin: A Bibliography 1933-76 (with a foreword by its subject) in 1979. After reading the typescript, Larkin wrote to Bloomfield on 31 May 1977 to praise the book’s ‘top-class bibliographical standards’ and tell him that ‘I couldn’t ask for a better bibliographer, and my only regret is that I am not much more than a five-finger exercise after Auden’ (A. Thwaite (ed.), Selected Letters of Philip Larkin 1940-1985 (London, 1992), p. 567); two years after the bibliography was published, Larkin wrote to his biographer Andrew Motion that ‘[i]t’s such a good book: I’m constantly referring to it’ (op. cit., p. 656).

Brought to Book is an account of Bloomfield’s friendship with Larkin over some twenty years, which was based on a paper that Bloomfield had given to the Friends of the British Library. The paper was revised for presentation to the Friends of Edinburgh University Library on 24 March 1995, and then published by them in this form later in the year. The text is prefaced by an introduction by Brenda E. Moon, the Librarian of the University of Edinburgh, who had previously worked with Larkin as his Deputy Librarian at the University of Hull. The Book Collector praised Brought to Book’s ‘acute and affectionate reminiscences’ and commended its ‘many characteristically wry remarks from Larkin to his bibliographer’ (The Book Collector, vol. 45 (1996), p. 386). Bloomfield subsequently revised and extended his bibliography for a second edition, which was published as Philip Larkin: A Bibliography 1933-94 in 2002, and the foreword to the later edition is an abbreviated version of the text published in Brought to Book.

It seems probable that the ‘Peter & Sheila’ to whom this copy was given were Bloomfield’s friends Professor Peter Davison OBE and his wife Sheila Davison.