First published in 1960, Summoned by Bells is John Betjeman's autobiography written entirely in verse, tracing his childhood and early adulthood through the streets of Edwardian London, the classrooms of English public schools and the landscapes of Cornwall.

Betjeman assembles a sequence of recollections in which architecture, family weirdness, youthful embarrassment and the rituals of English social life become the substance of memory. His characteristic combination of affection, satire and melancholy makes it lovely and attentive to the details that survive long after their apparent significance has disappeared.

This illustrated edition pairs Betjeman's poetry with watercolours and drawings by architect and artist Hugh Casson, which frame the personal recollection and the built environment. Betjeman treats architecture as a repository of feeling, class identity and historical change. A rather charming collaboration between two observers of English life, and an example of how autobiography can operate through the accumulation of places and impressions rather than the orderly reconstruction of events.

John Murray, London, 1989. First illustrated edition, produced in association with The Herbert Press. Hardcover with illustrated dust jacket. Good vintage condition, with light rubbing, discolouration and shelf wear to dust jacket. Illustrated throughout by Hugh Casson.