Bar-Room Ballads: A Book of Verse [*SIGNED*]

Toronto: Reginald Saunders. Very Good+. 1940. First Canadian Edition. Hardcover. (no dust jacket) [good sound copy, gilt spine lettering dulled but still fully readable, some discoloration to endpapers and also to pp. 80-81 (where a newspaper clipping or some other piece of acidic paper had once been laid in)]. INSCRIBED and SIGNED by the author on the front endpaper: "Cordial Greeting: / Robert Service." A relatively late work by the immensely popular British-Canadian poet (1874-1958) who was known as "the Bard of the Yukon" (and was sometimes called "the Canadian Kipling," which was not always meant, or taken, as a compliment). Whatever you may think of such doggerel as "The Ballad of Salvation Bill" or "Bessie's Boil," Service's relentlessly rhyming verse made him both famous and rich, the latter sufficiently to enable him to travel widely and to live for most of the rest of his life (after leaving Canada in 1913) in France, apart from a period in California during World War II. This book also bears a previous owner's signature on the front pastedown, plus a note indicating that she had acquired the book in Dawson, Yukon Territory, in 1941 (where Service had lived intermittently between 1908 and 1912, but from where he had long departed -- which raises the interesting (and probably unanswerable) question of where and how she obtained his signature). Signed by Author .