CUALA PRESS: YEATS, W. B.

Inquire · Offered by Peter Harrington

A Packet for Ezra Pound. First edition, first impression, one of 425 copies. Presenting one side of an intriguing literary and personal friendship, Yeats describes Pound as a man "whose art is the opposite of mine, whose criticism commends what I most condemn, a man with whom I should quarrel more than with anyone else if we were not united by affection".Yeats lived with Pound on more than one occasion: first in Ashdown Forest, where Pound's helped to renovate Yeats's poetic style for his 1914 collection Responsibilities, and later in Rapallo during the late 1920s, the period with which the present work is concerned. 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).

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