CUALA PRESS: YEATS, W. B.

£500 · Offered by Peter Harrington · No longer available

The King of the Great Clock Tower, Commentaries, and Poems. First edition, first impression, one of 400 copies published in December 1934. The title play premiered at The Abbey Theatre on 30 July 1934 (erroneously listed as 30 June in this edition) with dancer and choreographer Ninette de Valois in the lead role.The Cuala Press was one half of Cuala Industries, a co-operative business run by Lily and Elizabeth 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.

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