Woolverstone: Woolverstone Hall School, 1965

8vo, pp. 54. Original grey stiff paper wrappers, printed in black. Janus device to front wrapper. Preliminaries lightly foxed, wrappers slightly browned at spine. A very well preserved copy.

First edition of the Summer 1965 issue of the Woolverstone Hall school magazine, WITH A CONTRIBUTION FROM 17 YEAR OLD IAN McEWAN, THEN A STUDENT AT THE SCHOOL AND MEMBER OF THE MAGAZINE’S EDITORIAL BOARD.

Ian McEwan attend Woolverstone Hall, a state-run boarding school, between 1959 and 1966; in his 2022 novel Lessons, where it is renamed Berners Hall, the school plays a central role. On pp. 51-2 of this issue of the school’s magazine the then 17-year-old McEwan contributes Swinging, a part prose, part poetry disquisition on the death penalty, written in a seventeenth century style which may have been brought on by the sixth form’s reading list for that year. McEwan’s first regularly published story, Conversation with a Cupboard Man, would not be published until 1972, in the Spring/Summer issue of The Transatlantic Review.

McEwan’s name appears on the list of editorial committee members in the earlier Janus issue of Winter 1965, but that number contains no contributions from him. This issue of Janus contains the first appearance of McEwan’s writing in print. Only transcripts of McEwan’s contributions to his school magazine are lodged with his papers at HRC in Austin, Texas (Container 61.14), not the magazines themselves.

Rare.