Pearl of Great Price, A - The Love Letters of Dylan Thomas to Pearl Kazin

A Pearl of Great Price is edited and introduced by antiquarian bookseller Jeff Towns, who has been pursuing and dealing in the books, manuscripts, letters, iconography and ephemera surrounding Dylan Thomas from his bookstore in his home town of Swansea, for over forty years. In that time Jeff has been fortunate in handling some quite remarkable materials original letters to Dylan's wife, books inscribed to fellow writers and close friends and even the book Dylan inscribed and gave to Charlie Chaplin when they met in Hollywood.

New York, May, 1950.A warm Spring day and a short, and portly, thirty-five year old Welsh poet, Dylan Thomas, pushes through the plush revolving doors of Harper's Bazaar, in the heart of bustling downtown Manhattan. He was taking a chance on offering 'A Child's Christmas in Wales', a prose piece that had already served him well, but Harper's were not to know that.There, he meets Miss Pearl Kazin, Fiction Editor, highly-educated and out to make her own mark on New York; a woman, vastly different in manner, substance and background to his other New York 'lady-friends', with whom he fell in love, with consequences that were to disturb him profoundly for more than a year.An intense and passionate relationship began on that day. One side of their correspondence has survived, six 'love letters', never before published, sent from Dylan to Pearl. Until these letters came to light Pearl had remained something of a ghost; now, they offer part of Dylan's side of the story.