GOLDEN COCKEREL PRESS: MILTON, John.

£9,500 · Offered by Peter Harrington · No longer available

Paradise Lost. First Golden Cockerel edition, number 133 of 200 copies only. This copy is additionally inscribed by the printer: "With best wishes for 1941 from F. J. Newbery". Francis James Newbery (1881-1957) managed the Chiswick Press, which printed books for the Golden Cockerel Press after its acquisition in 1933 by Newbery, Christopher Sandford, and Owen Rutter.The illustrator, Mary Groom (1903-1958), studied under Leon Underwood, whose artistic circle emphasized the use of white lines in wood engraving. Hers "constitute the most coherent visual reading of Milton's text since Blake's, and that among Milton's many illustrators she is the one most attentive to the 'two great Sexes' that animate Milton's cosmos, a divinely and joyfully gendered universe" (Furman, p. 3).Newbery's pro-monarchical colophon states that printing concluded on the eve of the coronation of George VI. The text follows the first edition of 1667, arranged in ten books, and it incorporates Milton's later preface and arguments.

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