In Excelsis [Limited Edition, Signed]

London: Martin Secker, 1924. Very Good+/Very Good. London: Martin Secker, 1924. First Edition, Limited to 100 copies of which this is no. 60. Slim octavo; publisher's yellow cloth, top edge gilt, in cream dust jacket printed and ruled in red; 45pp. Dust jacket a bit toned, most heavily along spine panel, light dust-soil, boards slightly bowed, light offsetting to endpapers, else a Very Good, fresh and sound copy overall. Signed by the author on limitation page.

As he matured into middle age Lord Alfred Douglas (1870-1945) had grown increasingly conservative, denouncing his late former lover Oscar Wilde's homosexuality, and founding, in 1920, the virulently right-wing and anti-Semitic newspaper "Plain English," the vehicle with which he published the 1924 article accusing Winston Churchill of falsifying a report on the Battle of Jutland as part of a supposed conspiracy with a group of wealthy Jewish financiers. The Crown sued Douglas on Churchill's behalf and Douglas was sentenced to six months hard labor.

Within three months of his sentence Douglas was hospitalized for severe malnutrition and he spent the remainder of his term convalescing and composing this sequence of poems, pointedly titled "In Excelsis" ("in the highest"), the polar opposite of the title to Wilde's own prison poetry collection "De Profundis" ("from the depths"). As Douglas boasted in his introduction, the poems were confiscated from him upon his release from prison, but by then he had them committed to memory.