Thomas Hardy's Copy with his Max Gate Bookplate
Mansion House. 9th December, 1908 (Tercentenary of Milton's Birth). Programme of Music To be perfomed by the Students off the Guildhall School of Music Under the personal direction of D. W. H. Cummings, F.S.A. Principle.
[London]: 1908.
Price: $1,000.00
About the item
Illustrated plates interleaved, 15 pp. 4to. Publisher's wrappers. Generally very good, with Thomas Hardy's red Max Gate bookplate to the ffep.
Item #370216
"Immediately after Hardy’s death his books and papers were subjected to the critical scrutiny of Sydney Cockerell, notable bibliophile and director of the Fitzwilliam Museum, whom Hardy had appointed, jointly with Florence Hardy, as his literary executor. Cockerell had Max Gate bookplates made and inserted a good many of them himself...These, as Cockerell later explained in a letter to The Times Literary Supplement of 17 September 1938, were printed by the Cambridge University Press in two colours, ‘red for books containing Hardy’s signature or notes in his handwriting, black for the other selected books’, and his own contribution was to paste red labels into as many signed or annotated volumes ‘as I could find’, leaving the black labels ‘to be inserted by Mrs. Hardy or an assistant’ – an arrangement, so he claimed, that was ‘not fully carried out’." (Millgate, Thomas Hardy's Library at Max Gate: Catalogue of an Attempted Reconstruction).
