These special copies are printed on rich mould-made paper with a mild sheen that takes the ink perfectly, yielding matchless production values, and very sharp, fine lines. Binding and text in fine condition, with light foxing on a few leaves. The dust jacket is printed on the spine only, and has some fragments missing, some tears along edges, and rubbing at folds. Overall, a remarkable survival, and the only known example of a dust jacket on the large paper issue.
It was Ricketts who first encouraged Housman to work primarily in pen-and-ink, and these illustrations certainly show “in [their] strange attenuated forms some direct influence from Ricketts” (John Russell Taylor, The Art Nouveau Book in Britain). His androgynous style of illustration with pagan, stressed, unhappy fairies, is the perfect companion to Barlow’s allegorical fairy poem, inspired by Drayton’s Nymphidia].
Barton was an Irish ruralist writer, who had a great success with Irish Idylls, and The End of Elfintown tells of how the Fairy Folk became invisible. Oberon, King of the Fairies, was bewitched with a vision of urban life, and sets his subjects to work to build the city of his dreams. After building it, there is a Revolt of the Fays, who conclude that they have been cast into labouring servitude to create a “folly planned by one distraught / With some fantastic whimsy”. He is formally disenchanted (the mechanism is not clear) by an envoy of the worker-elves, and comes to his senses, admitting that his vision “Had meshed us soon in webs of woe, / Whence Fate hath willed we free should go”, and instructs his people to destroy the city, which leads (again the mechanism is not clear) to the current invisibility of the fairy world to humans.
