A CONCISE CLASSICAL DICTIONARY. CHRISTMAS 1988. ONE OF ONLY 250 COPIES.

Little Sparta: Wild Hawthorn Press, 1988

31.4 x 22cm, 52pp plus card covers and dustjacket. A series of “definitions”, one of Finlay’s innovations in experimental poetry where a word is given an alternative meaning by the addition of a classical or modern quotation. For example:

PATCH, n.

1. A whole part.

The trousers and jumpers of men vary in hue from the brightest orange vermilion to the palest rose pink, and are decorated with every imaginable sort of PATCH.

Peter Anson, The Breton Sardine Fisheries.


As we have noted elsewhere Finlay regards a patch as a symbol of warm, caring as well as poverty.

Slight bumping to corners of the book – else VG+. One of 250 copies published at Christmas 1988.