Time Was Away: A Notebook in Corsica by Alan Ross and John Minton (1948)

Time Was Away is a book about Corsica, the result of a close artistic collaboration between a poet and a painter. The drawings and prose combine to produce a sensuous evocation of place and to convey the particular quality of landscape and life in Corsica – the bays and mountains, the marquis and the olive groves, the picturesque old ports, a romantic past that holds the present in a death-like spell, and the ennui that suddenly bubbles over into exaggerated drama and then as quickly subsides. Mostly it is the great visual and sensual enjoyment of colour, inanimate beauty and wildness, a descriptive study in fact of Corsica as a microcosm of the Mediterranean. The book contains over fifty illustrations, including eight in full colour, portraits of famous Corsican historical figures, maps and a number of poems.Condition: small segment of loss to the top left corner of the dust-wrapper’s front panel (see photo). A faint mark to the yellow cloth of the front board.