Satyrs & Sunlight: Silvarum Libri (Limited edition)

A$200 · Offered by Harry Hartog Rare Books

Limited edition

McCRAE, Hugh (illus. Norman Lindsay). Satyrs Sunlight: Silvarum Libri. Printed by John Sands Ltd. and published for the author by John Lane Mullins, Sydney, 1909. Demy Quarto. Original quarter vellum and grey-blue boards with bevelled edges. Spine and upper board lettered and decorated in gilt. Uncut. [xvi], 149, [iv] pp.; frontispiece portrait of the author; 8 tinted lithograph plates by Norman Lindsay present (see condition note); title page vignette printed in red and black; text illustrations and decorations throughout by Norman Lindsay. List of subscribers and colophon at rear. First edition. Limited to 130 numbered copies, initialled by the author. This copy unnumbered. Incomplete — plates deficient (see condition note). There is a passage in the Australian Dictionary of Biography describing Hugh McCrae's arrival in the Sydney literary world of the early 1900s as something like the arrival of a foreign element — a poet of classical sensuality, colour, and pagan delight in a literary culture still largely dominated by the bush ballad tradition and its democratic plain-speaking. The poems gathered in Satyrs amp; Sunlight — written between McCrae's arrival in Sydney in the late 1890s and the book's publication in 1909 — exist in a world of fauns and nymphs, sunlit glades, and Dionysiac excess, rendered in verse of real lyric beauty. They are not poems of Australia as Australia was usually written about; they are poems of an imagined Mediterranean Arcadia transplanted to Au

• Binding: Hardcover

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