One of 25, Anthony Powell's Copy
The Sphinx.
London: Elkin Mathews and John Lane. At the Sign of the Bodley Head. Boston Copeland and Day LXIX Cornhill, 1894.
Ricketts, Charles. LARGE PAPER, one of 25 copies. Printed by the Ballantyne Press. Illustrated by Charles Ricketts with wood-engraved title page, half and full-page designs, ornamental initials. Printed in red, black and green. Unpaginated. 1 vols. Slender 8vo (10 x 7-3/8 inches.). One of 25, Anthony Powell's Copy. Original full vellum gilt, with fantastic designs, including 2 weird female sphinx on both sides by Charles Ricketts, uncut The deluxe binding has "extra ornaments to the sides and inner marges of the binding and with ribbons". The binding is signed by Ricketts with monogram CR on the upper cover; the monogram of the binder, Leighton Son and Hodge, appears on the lower cover. The deluxe issue has an added lower border on the binding and ties. Fine copy, custom half morocco clamshell box Mason 362; Nelson, A View from the Bodley Head, pp.45- 46 passim; Wick, THE TURN OF A CENTURY 1885-1910, Number 10; Ray, Illustrator and the Book, 262. Provenance: Anthony Powell (his bookplate). Item #319476
“The monsters of the Egyptian room at the British Museum live again in his weird, sometimes repulsive, but all the same stately and impressive lines. The vellum binding, the various symbolic designs, the quaint rubricated initials and the general arrangement of the text, all by Mr. Ricketts’ sympathetic art, are most subtly infused by the spirit of the poem...” (Pall Mall Budget, June 21, 1894). This was the last book Wilde published before his imprisonment.
“the most beautiful and consummately designed trade book of the 1890s” — Nelson
With the bookplate of novelist Anthony Powell (1905-2000), about whose suite of novels, A Dance to the Music of Time, Guy Davenport observed, “The only book I know that takes Proust’s habitual narrative gestures, Anglicizes them, and succeeds in the effort. In fact, Powell is the best critical study of Proust.”
A CHOICE COPY OF ONE OF THE MOST BEAUTIFUL BOOKS OF THE 1890s.
Price: $32,500.00 Free International Delivery
