One Grail

Only rarely does a private collector know the profound pleasure, one always tinged with disappointment, which springs from the completion of a long and arduous quest. For an institution, however, the pleasure can come pure and undiluted, as it has with the acquisition of Nurse Cavell: A Play in 3 Acts by C. E. Bechhofer Roberts and C. S. Forester (London: John Lane, 1933). Georgetown's collection of the works of C. S. Forester was the result of 20 years of intense collecting effort, and yet it still came to the university incomplete, lacking two among Forester's more than 100 English and American first editions. The Shadow of the Hawk (London: John Lane, 1927), by far the scarcest of Forester's novels, was acquired within three months after the collection came to Georgetown.

It took almost two years, however, to land the ultimate quarry, an almost-forgotten play about England's nurse-martyr of World War I written by Forester in collaboration with an almost-forgotten author. Remarkably, Georgetown's copy of Nurse Cavell is distinguished by the presence of anonymous, but extensive, annotations shortening and tightening the text for an as yet untraced production of the play.