Читать книгу Revolt in the Desert - T. E. Lawrence - Страница 6

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This book, written in 1919, was printed on a newspaper press in Oxford shortly after, not for publication, but as a convenience to myself and friends. Some of them asked for copies of their own: and from that demand gradually grew the idea of a richly-produced edition, with many portrait drawings, to be published by subscription at a stiff price.

The stiff price, though it covered the cost of printing, was not stiff enough to pay the artists adequately. Some of the richer artists agreed to work for nominal fees: and I raised money to pay the others by selling to Jonathan Cape the right to bring out this abridgment. It amounts to less than half of the original text (which occupied the reading hours of my friends for months), but half a calamity is better than a whole one, and this fairly represents all sides of the story.

If I am asked why I have abridged an unsatisfactory book, instead of recasting it as a history, I must plead that to do so nice a job in the barracks which have been my home since 1922 would need a degree of concentration amounting in an airman to moroseness: and an interest in the subject which was exhausted long ago in the actual experience of it.

'T. E. L.'