I’m only missing a few Katharine Susannah Prichard books from my collection and so these days filling in a gap is rare – and often expensive. I wasn’t expecting to come across a copy of Clovelly Verses, especially not at a price I could stretch to. But there it was in my Ebay alerts for $200.

Clovelly Verses was Katharine’s first book, a tiny pamphlet of conventional nature poems privately printed in 1913 while she was living in London. ‘Let me not forget / Each tiny floweret / Which in the hedgerow grows’. It was an undistinguished debut, if it could be considered that, but it pleased the dedicatee: her mother.

Katharine would hand copies out to friends and people she met. She gave one to the playboy socialist, Guido Baracchi, when she met him on the boat from Columbo to Australia in the last days of 1915. He thought it was brilliant and nearly 60 years later, after Katharine’s death, he told her son he would pay anything for a copy; his had been borrowed and not returned.

I’m not sure of this inscription in my copy – I think it will remain a mystery. Katharine has also made a couple of hand corrections to poems.

I’ve seen the book twice before. The first time, at the National Library, an uncatalogued copy was slipped in a file of other items. A secret copy to greet future researchers. The second was in a private library of the son of a friend of the family. It had a lengthy dedication and a letter from Katharine’s son slipped inside it.

A consequence of my acquisition: I’m now checking Ebay far too often, greeted by alerts from a seller eagerly relisting a 1980s KSP paperback each week.