About this Item
Cockerell marbled wrappers, printed paper label. Spine very slightly faded, traces of glue (as not infrequently in the printer's career) at edges of lettering-label. Edition limited to 20 numbered copies "for private distribution", though the final number, as Corvo's bibliographer Cecil Woolf reports, was fewer. He quotes Alan Anderson: "The whole production was a disaster from beginning to end. In the first place the paper was unsatisfactory and did not suit my machine very well. After the sheets were all printed some of them were accidentally spoiled and I had to use several rejected ones. Even then I was unable to issue more than 15 copies of the full 20 . . . About four perfect copies, possibly five, had the recipient's name printed below the limitation notice." This copy, a tidy one, has no printed recipient and is numbered "10". "Dear Father Beauclerk: I am sure your memory must be playing you a trick. There was nothing interesting in the Flintshire Observer, beyond the fact that its style is as execrably vulgar as it was ten years ago; & that is what makes the sending it to me do gratuitous & wanton. But, you know, really, the address on the wrapper & the adnotations of the text - (I preserve them both -) are obviously in your unmistakeable script. However, we will take it that you acted on a now-forgotten impulse, intending no malignance . . ." Fr Charles Beauclerk (1855-1934) was the Catholic parish priest at Holywell, North Wales, 1890-8, who commissioned Rolfe in the mid-1890s to paint banners for church use in civic processions; they fell out over the question of payment and Rolfe wrote him, rudely, into Hadrian the Seventh (1904). Seller Inventory # E100103
Contact seller
Report this item
