February, 2026

With Valentine’s Day, the thoughts turn to love, and of course love has no boundaries, national or cultural.  English literature abounds with love poetry, and novels charting the troubled courses of love and marriage and relationships.

 

Robert Graves wrote on the love and relations between men and women, from the enquiry into the mythological White Goddess, to poems that reflect and muse on love. We have a first edition copy of his collection of poems Love Respect, signed by Graves.

 

And thoughts on love in the 20^th C can’t ignore the ground-breaking, scandalous exploration of love and sexuality that is D H Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover. This is now of course a classic that can still absorb and delight. We have a copy of the first pirated edition printed by the Florentine bookseller Giuseppe 'Pino' Orioli from 1928.

 

In the South Seas love seemed everywhere to the first Europeans and later writers were taken with Māori stories that still resonate. The love story of Hinemoa and Tutānekai, with Hinemoa’s swim to her lover on the island of Mokoia in Lake Rotorua, is well known and loved. We have an early extremely rare NZ novel about this story by Joseph Ollivant, Hine Moa, the Maori Maiden, published in 1879, and including a poem and notes on NZ history, mythology and flora and fauna.

 

Another NZ tale was written by that poet, politician (NZ premier in 1862-63) and friend of Robert Browning, Alfred Domett.  We have a copy of his long poem Ranolf and Amohia: a South-Sea Day-Dream, first published in 1872 and telling the story of two young lovers in pre-colonial New Zealand.

 

Love is in the air this month, no matter where you are or when in history.