CUALA PRESS: GOGARTY, Oliver St John.

£200 · Offered by Peter Harrington · No longer available

An Offering of Swans. First edition, first impression, one of 300 copies. The work was printed in October 1923 but not released until January 1924. In January 1923, Gogarty was held by militant republicans, but escaped by leaping into the Liffey. In gratitude he ceremonially introduced two swans to the river, commemorated in the title of this collection of his poetry.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). 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 his closest female friend, and he was on the subscribers list for the press from its inception.

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