Reunion All Round; Or, Jael's Hammer laid aside, and the Milk of Human Kindness beaten up into Butter and serv'd in a lordly Dish
Society of SS. Peter and Paul, 1914. First edition. Original pale green pictorial wrappers printed in dark green, text (8 1/2 inches tall) stitched in long overlapping wrappers (9 1/2 inches tall). Modest creasing to text and wrappers but no chipping or tearing. A crisp, clean copy in near-fine condition. Item #1552
"THANK GOD, IN THESE DAYS OF ENLIGHTENMENT AND ESTABLISHMENT, EVERYONE HAS A RIGHT TO HIS OWN OPINIONS, AND CHIEFLY TO THE OPINION, THAT NOBODY ELSE HAS A RIGHT TO THEIRS"
First edition of Reunion All Round—Ronald Knox's Swiftian satire on the Church of England—printed by the Chiswick Press and published as the "masterpiece of the Society of SS. Peter and Paul" (Evelyn Waugh). Scarce.
Reunion All Round was published a year after Knox's Absolute and Abitofhell (and in a larger format). "This pasquinade, in the manner of Swift, was written in four days at Eastertide 1914. It satirized the impulse prevalent among certain Anglicans to sink doctrinal differences with the Nonconformist sects in the interests of good Christian fellowship" (Evelyn Waugh). Knox's name does not appear on the front wrapper or the title page. "For Ronald it was the last flowering of his precocious youth; the perfect culmination of the golden summer of 1914" (Waugh). Knox closes with a prediction: "We shall make the Church of England true to her Catholic vocation, which is, plainly, to include within her border every possible shade of belief."
The text was decorated with an engraved headpiece and tailpiece and printed on laid paper. "Mr. Gurney took immense pains to produce the replica of a late seventeenth-century pamphlet and made it the masterpiece of the Society of SS. Peter and Paul" (Waugh). Knox himself commented, "whereas Absolute and Abitofhell was the work of months, Reunion All Round...was completed in four days...the production was a matter of anxious care both to Mr. Gurney and to myself; the type and the spelling of Swift's day had to be carefully imitated, as well as the rubrication of the title-page: even the paper was of a brownish cream colour, that gave the impression of having been soiled by age" (A Spiritual Aeneid). Prefaced with a Dedication: "To Dr. and Mrs. Henry Head who are scientific enough to appreciate clear thinking and / human enough to appreciate Dr. Jonathan Swift." Evelyn Waugh. The Life of the Right Reverend Ronald Knox.
Price: $100.00