CROSSINGS; A Fairy Play with music by C. Armstrong Gibbs

London: W. Collins, 1923. First Edition. 8vo, pp. 169. Bound in cloth backed boards with worn leather label. Signed on the end paper by DeLaMare with a presentation by Gibbs (?) seemingly signed "Cecil" All Music: " Cecil Armstrong Gibbs (who preferred to drop Cecil) was born on August 10, 1889, in Great Baddow, Essex, England. Owing to his mother's death when he was two, several aunts raised him. Cognizant of the boy's extraordinary musical gifts, they implored his father to pursue a musical education for him. But the father resisted, sending him to preparatory school, then to Winchester College. Gibbs began his first advanced musical instruction at Cambridge in 1911, studying composition with Charles Wood and E.J. Dent.

Conductor Adrian Boult was impressed by Gibbs' score for the 1919 play Crossings (text by Walter de la Mare), and arranged for further study for Gibbs at the Royal College of Music, where his chief composition teacher was Ralph Vaughan Williams. Gibbs joined the faculty there in 1921, teaching until 1939.