CUALA PRESS: GREGORY, Lady Augusta.

Inquire · Offered by Peter Harrington

Coole. First edition, first impression, one of 250 copies. Lady Gregory's final book provides an affectionate account of her house, with chapters about the contents and histories of the principal rooms and the estate's now-famous woods and lake. The work can be seen as the author's personal farewell to the property, written as her health failed and she strove to commemorate both the house and park. The volume opens with W. B. Yeats's "Coole Park, 1929," a magisterial meditation on Gregory's "powerful character" and her influence on him and other writers of the Irish Revival.The Cuala Press was one half of Cuala Industries, a co-operative business run by Elizabeth and Lily Yeats. Cuala Industries was founded with the aim of reviving the craft of book printing in Ireland and "to give work to Irish girls" (McMurtrie, p. 472). In 1925 it moved to a premises in Dublin which, for the first time, allowed a showroom to display the business's books, prints, cards, and embroideries. The press's "clearly legible, slender volumes with their distinctive paper labels may be seen as the sole survivors of the handcrafted ideal established in 1900 by Walker and T. J. Cobden-Sanderson's Doves Press" (ODNB).This copy is from the library of Louis Claude Purser (1854-1932), brother of the artist Sarah Purser. A fellow classics student with Oscar Wilde at school, Purser was appointed professor of Latin at Trinity College, Dublin, and later served as president of the Royal Irish Academy. Elizabeth

• Printing: first

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