FIRSTS ONLINE Winter 2020

16. ROBSON, Don
Young and Sensitive
London: Hutchinson, 1964
8vo, pp. 175. Uncorrected proof copy. Original printed red stiff paper
wrappers, lettered in black to front panel and spine. Endpapers illustrated
with facsimile manuscript. Offsetting from newspaper clipping to pp. 110-111,
otherwise a near fine copy with just a little age-toning.
Uncorrected proof copy of the author’s first book. Sort of....
Young and Sensitive was written while Don Robson was in inmate of
Dartmoor Prison. It was well reviewed (‘A work of outstanding merit.
It has a crude, jagged sort of vivacity...’), and won the Arthur Koestler
Literary Award, founded to recognise work produced by prisoners,
and judged by such luminaries as J.B. Priestley, Henry Green and V.S.
Pritchett.
Unfortunately, none of these luminaries had read a book called Fires
of Youth by Charles Williams. Don Robson had - it was in the prison
library. To pass the time while serving his four year sentence for car
theft, Robson decided to copy out Williams’ book pretty much word for
word and set himself up as an author. It was only after Hutchinson had
sold more than 3,000 copies, Clive Exton had written a script, and Karel
Reisz was preparing to shoot the film for British Lion, that the deception
was discovered. By that time Robson had been released on licence.
Using the money he’d snaffled by selling the film rights, he got married
and set up home in Wigan. Critics were ridiculed, prison authorities
conducted inquiries, and a Dartmoor prison warder said: ‘I reckon they
ought to give the bloke a Duke of Edinburgh Award for initiative’.
A contemporary account from the Evening Standard is laid in between
pp. 110-111, and has resulted in heavy offsetting to those two pages.
Otherwise, a lovely proof copy of a book whose own story completely
upstages the one it contains.
£175
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