ESSEX HOUSE PRESS: TENNYSON, Alfred, Lord.

£1,750 · Offered by Peter Harrington · No longer available

Maud. First Essex House Press edition, number 56 of 125 copies, each printed on vellum and hand-coloured, with a frontispiece by Reginald Savage and Laurence Housman in collaboration, cut by Clarence Housman. Tennyson's poem was first published in Maud, and Other Poems in 1855, his first collection after becoming poet laureate in 1850.The initial letters were illuminated by Anastasia Power, a student of Douglas Cockerell who ran the Essex House bindery from 1902 to 1905. "An accomplished artist and calligrapher", she practised illumination with Fred Partridge alongside her role as binder and provided the illumination for much of the Press's output (Dowd, p. 61).The Essex House Press "came from the heart of the arts and crafts movement" (Franklin, p. 64). It was founded by Charles Robert Ashbee and Laurence Hodson following the closure of William Morris's Kelmscott Press in 1897; after Morris's death, Ashbee bought his Albion printing presses, and employed one of the Kelmscott compositors, Thomas Binning.

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