T.H. White "The Once and Future King" Limited Collector's Edition, Leather-Bound

Reclaim the Legend: Experience T.H. White’s Masterpiece in Exquisite Collector's Leather. Complete with the original note card and Masterpieces of Fantasy bookplate. 

The Easton Press: Norwalk, CT 1997. T.H. White "The Once and Future King" Limited Collector's Edition, Leather-Bound. Luxuriously bound in full genuine leather with 22kt gold accents. A beautiful edition for the book collector. Includes the collector's note card along with the Masterpieces of Fantasy bookplate. 649 pages. 

Frontispiece by David Martin.

The Once and Future King

The Once and Future King is a collection of fantasy novels by T. H. White about the legend of King Arthur. It is loosely based upon the 1485 work Le Morte d'Arthur by Sir Thomas Malory. It was first published in 1958 as a collection of shorter novels that were published from 1938 to 1940, with some new or amended material. The title refers to a legend that Arthur will one day return as king.

Plot

Most of the book takes place in Gramarye, the name that White gives to Britain, and chronicles the youth and education of King Arthur, his rule as king, and the romance between Sir Lancelot and Queen Guinevere. The story starts in the final years of the rule of King Uther Pendragon, Arthur's father.

T. H. White’s masterful retelling of the saga of King Arthur is a fantasy classic as legendary as Excalibur and Camelot, and a poignant story of adventure, romance, and magic that has enchanted readers for generations.

Once upon a time, a young boy called “Wart” was tutored by a magician named Merlyn in preparation for a future he couldn’t possibly imagine. A future in which he would ally himself with the greatest knights, love a legendary queen and unite a country dedicated to chivalrous values. A future that would see him crowned and known for all time as Arthur, King of the Britons.

During Arthur’s reign, the kingdom of Camelot was founded to cast enlightenment on the Dark Ages, while the knights of the Round Table embarked on many a noble quest. But Merlyn foresaw the treachery that awaited his liege: the forbidden love between Queen Guenever and Lancelot, the wicked plots of Arthur’s half-sister Morgause and the hatred she fostered in Mordred that would bring an end to the king’s dreams for Britain—and to the king himself.

Reviews

“A fierce and damaged man, T. H. White wrote about fierce and damaged people—and children, and animals—with a brilliant, painful innocence that has no equal in literature. He is so good at hurt and shame—how did he also manage to be so funny? I have laughed at his great Arthurian novel and cried over it and loved it all my life.”—Ursula K. Le Guin

“Certain books offer pleasures so rich and enduring, they become part of what defines us. The Once and Future King is like that for me. It manages—by some miracle—to be about its own time, and a distant, legendary time, and about today. It mingles wisdom, wonderful, laugh-out-loud humor and deep sorrow—while telling one of the great tales of the Western world. I envy the reader coming to it for the first time.”—Guy Gavriel Kay

“White took hold of the ultimate English epic and recast it in modern literary language, sacrificing none of its grandeur or its strangeness in the process, and adding in all the humor and passion that we expect from a novel. What was once as stiff and two-dimensional as a medieval tapestry becomes rich and real and devastatingly sad.”—Lev Grossman

“Touching, profound, funny and tragic.”—Los Angeles Times

“Richly imagined and unfailingly eloquent and entertaining, its appeal is timeless and universal. If a reader reads only one Arthurian tale, let this be it.”—Booklist

“The Once and Future King is full of insights, scenes and flourishes that are really quite astonishing.”—The Guardian (U.K.)

T.H. White 

Terence Hanbury "Tim" White (29 May 1906 – 17 January 1964) was an English writer. He is best known for his Arthurian novels, which were published together in 1958 as The Once and Future King. One of his best known is the first of the series, The Sword in the Stone, which was published as a stand-alone book in 1938.

Writing

White's novel Earth Stopped (1934) and its sequel Gone to Ground (1935) are science fiction novels about a disaster that devastates the world. Gone to Ground contains several fantasy stories told by the survivors that were later reprinted in The Maharajah and Other Stories.

White wrote to a friend that, in autumn 1937, "I got desperate among my books and picked [Malory] up in lack of anything else. Then I was thrilled and astonished to find that (a) the thing was a perfect tragedy, with a beginning, a middle and an end implicit in the beginning and (b) the characters were real people with recognizable reactions which could be forecast. ... Anyway, I somehow started writing a book."

The novel, which White described as "a preface to Malory", was titled The Sword in the Stone and published in 1938, telling the story of the boyhood of King Arthur.[8] White was also influenced by Freudian psychology and his own lifelong involvement in natural history. The Sword in the Stone was critically well received and was a Book of the Month Club selection in 1939.

In February 1939, White moved to Doolistown in County Meath, Ireland, where he lived out the Second World War as a de facto conscientious objector.[9] During his stay in Ireland, White lived with an Irish couple, Paddy and Lena McDonagh, who continued to correspond with White after he had left the country. During his stay in Ireland, White met the Irish writers Frank O'Connor and Lord Dunsany. In Ireland, he wrote most of what became The Once and Future King: The Witch in the Wood (later cut and rewritten as The Queen of Air and Darkness) in 1939, and The Ill-Made Knight in 1940. The version of The Sword in the Stone included in The Once and Future King differs from the earlier version; it is darker, and some critics prefer the earlier version.