CUALA PRESS: HIGGINS, F. R.

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Arable Holdings: Poems. First edition, first impression, number 180 of 300 copies numbered by Elizabeth Yeats. Higgins's bucolic poems "belonged to the last wave of the literary revival, which made a cult of ballad and folk poetry... no Irish poet of his generation had a finer feeling for landscape or colour" (DIB).He was a student of W. B. Yeats, often described as the literary heir apparent, and collaborated with the Yeats siblings on the press's Broadsides. He served on the board of the Abbey Theatre from 1935, taking on the role of managing director from 1938.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 h

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