First edition. 8vo. Original cloth with brilliant gilt cover design after Charles Ricketts, gilt lettering on front cover and spine. Top edge gilt. London: Elkin Mathews & John Lane; New York: Macmillan & Company, 1893 [i.e., 1892.
Symons greatly admired Ricketts’s books and considered them to be among the most remarkable of those issued in that first great decade of modern book production. He writes that they are ‘the products of an historically learned mind applied unhistorically … [they] present a fantastic mixture of archaic pedanticism and revolutionary defiance of precedent’ (Symons in “Fine Printing”, p. 105 / Nelson BH p. 46)
The variant on thicker paper, the text block bulking some half a centimetre thicker than the above copy. A fine copy.
