HAFEZ; Justin Huntly McCARTHY ( translator ). Ghazels from the Divan of Hafiz.

£1,850 · Offered by Henry Sotheran Ltd

Beardsley’s Bookplate for Aleister Crowley’s Lover HAFEZ; Justin Huntly McCARTHY ( translator ). Ghazels from the Divan of Hafiz. London : [ Chiswick Press for ] David Nutt . 1893. 8vo. Publisher’s green boards, title lettered to upper board in Persian in teal, spine lettered in English in teal, yapp fore-edges; pp. vii, [1 (blank)], 151, [1]; spine ends bumped, spine lightly soiled; offsetting to free endpapers, but internally clean and bright; a very good copy; contemporary inscription ‘Aux cœurs blessés, l’ombre et le silence’ (Balzac) to front pastedown and free endpaper, bookplate of Herbert Charles Pollitt, designed by Aubrey Beardsley and lettered ‘Mr Pollitt’s Bookplate’, to front pastedown ( see below ). First edition of this prose translation of Hafez’s fourteenth-century Persian poems by the Irish politician Justin Huntly McCarthy (1859–1936), this copy with Beardsley’s rare bookplate made for his patron, Herbert Charles Pollitt (1871–1942), at one point the owner of most of Beardsley’s Lysistrata drawings; it is one of only three bookplates Beardsley designed and was initially intended for the artist’s own use. ‘Beardsley had been promising Pollitt a bookplate for some time. When this drawing was published in A Book of Fifty Drawings in 1897 conscience may have got the better of the artist and in Pollitt’s copy of the edition de luxe Beardsley added the lettering in india ink on the reproduction. From this Pollitt had a new block made (by Carl Hentschel) for his o

• Binding: Hardcover

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