CUALA PRESS: YEATS, W. B.

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The Death of Synge, and Other Passages From an Old Diary. First edition, first impression, one of 400 copies. The diary extracts cover the period following the death of John Millington Synge, age 37, on 24 March 1909. It includes conversations with Synge's widow, Molly Allgood, Yeats's sisters Elizabeth and Lily, and literary figures such as Florence Farr, as well as Yeats's ruminations on Ireland's political and literary state.Yeats, a long-term collaborator of Synge's at the Abbey Theatre, described him in the preface to Synge's posthumous collection Poems and Translations (1909) as "a solitary, undemonstrative man, never asking pity, nor complaining, nor seeking sympathy but in this book's momentary cries: all folded up in brooding intellect, knowing nothing of new books and newspapers, reading the great masters alone: and he was but the more hated because he gave his country what it needed, an unmoved mind where there is a perpetual last day, a trumpeting, and coming up to judgement". Synge's "premature death affected Yeats profoundly" (DIB).The Cuala Press was one half of Cuala Industries, a co-operative business run by Lily and Elizabeth 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, s

• Printing: first

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