CUALA PRESS: YEATS, W. B.

£350 · Offered by Peter Harrington · No longer available

Dramatis Personae. First edition, first impression, one of 400 copies printed by Elizabeth Yeats in October 1935 and published in December, the errata slip loosely inserted. The autobiographical extracts first appeared in The London Mercury in November and December of that year.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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