CAVEAT EMPTOR - Revolt in the Desert

In recent years I have seen several allegedly signed copies of Lawrence’s Revolt in the Desert offered on eBay.

These are almost certainly forgeries, done by different people at different times. Some of the forgeries are very crude, but others are fairly passable.

Lawrence stated that he would never sign a copy of Revolt in the Desert. To my knowledge he did so only once, when he wrote a passage from Seven Pillars in the front of a copy of Revolt for his friend Charlotte Shaw (the wife of Bernard Shaw). That copy is now in the British Library. It is sometimes alleged that he also inscribed a copy for the South Waziristan Scouts, but the claim stemmed from a misleading photograph, which showed the note he sent with the book laid on to one of its front flyleaves.

If someone offers you a signed copy of Revolt in the Desert, it’s most unlikely to be genuine - however good it looks. To be credible, a signed Revolt would need a cast-iron end-to-end provenance.

Jeremy Wilson

This entry was posted on 27/05/2008 at 11:34 am and is filed under Collecting, Auctions. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.

| Print