CUALA PRESS: PARNELL, Thomas.

Inquire · Offered by Peter Harrington

Poems. Selected by Lennox Robinson. First edition thus, first impression, one of 200 copies. The Anglo-Irish clergyman Thomas Parnell (1678-1718) was a friend of Pope and Swift and an ancestor of W. B. Yeats's political hero, the nationalist politician Charles Stewart Parnell. His poems are accompanied by an introductory essay by the dramatist Lennox Robinson.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 Yeats was his closest female friend.

• Printing: first

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