The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Three Other Poems (Folio Society Limited Edition)

A$1,000 · Offered by Harry Hartog Rare Books

Limited edition

COLERIDGE, Samuel Taylor (illus. Harry Brockway). The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Three Other Poems. London: The Folio Society, 2010. Quarto. Quarter vellum and red boards. Spine lettered in 22-carat gold. Cover illustrated and stamped in three shades of foil by Harry Brockway. Upper edge gilt, others uncut. 205 pp., with 16 mounted colour plates by Harry Brockway. All text printed on verso pages only, with facing blank recto pages throughout. Signed and numbered by the artist on tipped-in frontispiece. Housed in charcoal buckram solander case. First Folio Society edition. Limited to 1,000 numbered copies, this being number 25. The Rime of the Ancient Mariner first appeared in the 1798 Lyrical Ballads , a joint publication with Wordsworth that announced the English Romantic movement and the Rime remains the longest and strangest poem in that collection. A tale of supernatural crime and punishment set on a becalmed sea, narrated by a mariner compelled to repeat his story to strangers until the end of time, haunted by what he did to an albatross and what that act cost him and everyone around him. Coleridge was twenty-five when he wrote it, and it is one of those poems that seems to have arrived fully formed from somewhere not entirely explained by the ordinary processes of literary composition. It has attracted illustrators from Gustave Doré onwards, each bringing their own understanding of its particular quality of nightmare. Harry Brockway brings a printmaker's sensibilit

• Binding: Hardcover

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