First separate edition. On 25 March 1972 the distinguished surgeon, scholar, and bibliographer Sir Geoffrey Keynes celebrated his 85th birthday, and the spring 1972 issue of The Book Collector (a journal to which Keynes had frequently contributed), commemorated this event. The editor Nicolas Barker’s prefatory ‘To Geoffrey Keynes’ introduces the issue with the words ‘his friends have conspired [...] to offer him a present whose form, theme, and subject will, we hope, give him pleasure’ (p. 7). The contributors included William Le Fanu, John Sparrow, A.N.L. Munby, Charles Ryskamp, Francis Meynell, David Garnett, Rupert Hart-Davis, and the Festschrift’s indefatigable subject, who contributed ‘Blake’s Engravings for Gay’s Fables’ (pp. 59-64). ¶¶

Keynes and Hart-Davis first met in 1939, when Keynes was preparing his catalogue of Edward Gibbon’s library and David Garnett recommended it to Jonathan Cape. Hart-Davis, who had been appointed a director of Jonathan Cape in 1933, ‘was put in charge of me and my editorial efforts. My friendship with Sir Rupert has ripened through fifty [sic] years of association with him in various capacities’ (G.L. Keynes, The Gates of Memory (Oxford, 1981), p. 250). Hart-Davis recalled that The Library of Edward Gibbon was issued ‘in one of the worst months in publishing history – April 1940. It achieved the splendid record of selling fewer copies than any book ever published by Cape – under a hundred, I remember – and since most of the unsold stock was soon destroyed by enemy action, the book must be the rarest in all Geoffrey’s extensive oeuvre’ (p. 51). Despite this inauspicious beginning, the personal and professional relationship between the two men flourished, and when Hart-Davis founded his own firm with David Garnett after the war, its first publication was Keynes’s edition of Rupert Brooke’s essay Democracy and the Arts (1946). ¶¶

‘A Little Injudicious Levity’ opens with the words ‘[f]earing lest this birthday tribute might be overweighted with Pure Bibliography, I rashly offered to provide some tempering frivolity, but – a thousand words! Really, Mr. Editor, what can you be thinking of? It’s like asking one to inscribe the whole of [Sir Thomas Browne’s] Urn Burial on a halfpenny stamp. Brief mention of Geoffrey’s own publications would require a great many words, and what about the 4000 and more treasures recorded in [Keynes’s] Bibliotheca Bibliographici? Oh well, frivolity it will have to be’ (p. 51). Hart-Davis’s witty and evocative memoir of his friendship with Geoffrey and Margaret Keynes concludes ‘[a]t his seventieth birthday party in the Great Hall of St Bartholomew’s Hospital [...], Geoffrey wound up by reminding the company that his father had lived to ninety-seven, his mother to ninety-six, and said he looked forward to welcoming us all again for his hundredth birthday. I am saving up for a trip to London on that day, but in the meantime I foresee a request for another thousand words in 1977 – and anyhow my present ration is almost exhausted: I have room only to send to Geoffrey and Margaret, across the miles and over the years, my gratitude, admiration, and love’ (p. 53). ¶¶

‘A Little Injudicious Levity’ was later collected (with twelve other contributions from this issue of The Book Collector) in To Geoffrey Keynes: Articles Contributed to “The Book Collector” to Commemorate his Eighty-Fifth Birthday (London, 1972). ¶¶¶