The Songs of Songs; Called by Many the Canticle of Canticles
Waltham St. Lawrence: Golden Cockerel Press, 1925. Limited edition. Quarto (10 3/8 inches tall), original gilt white cloth, top edge gilt, uncut, original dust wrapper. Bookplate. Gilt still bright, corners still sharp, gentle toning to spine of largely clean boards. Splitting and chipping to flaps and spine of intact scarce original dust jacket. A near-fine copy. Item #1605
"SET ME AS A SEAL UPON THY HEART / AS A SIGNET ON THINE ARM / FOR LOVE IS STRONG AS DEATH"
Limited first edition of the Golden Cockerel Song of Songs—a superb copy of Eric Gill's first illustrations from Scripture. One of 750 numbered copies, complete as published in the scarce original dust wrapper illustrated with Holy Spirit as Dove from the title page. This is bibliographer and book historian John Waynflete Carter's copy, with his printed label on the front endpaper. A beautiful copy.
In 1924, Gill and his family departed from their home among the Catholic craftsmen gathered at Ditchling, Sussex and relocated to Capel-y-ffin in the remote mountains of South Wales. Gill's move permanently ended his already ruptured partnership with Hilary Pepler and St. Dominic's Press. This next phase of Gill's career was marked by his work with Robert Gibbings and the Golden Cockerel Press. The Song of Songs was Gill's first major collaboration with Gibbings, heralding a period of great creativity and culminating in the triumph of The Four Gospels (1931).
Also known as the Song of Solomon and the Canticle of Canticles, the Song of Songs is the Old Testament’s celebration of romantic love. The sensuality of the poetic passages was an ideal focus for the development of Gill’s devotion to the idea of "Divine Love," a blending of the erotic and the spiritual (and a theme to which he would return again and again). A brief Preface (by "The Editor") characterizes this edition as "the first Opera, written with an avowedly popular appeal" and stressing a Judeo-Christian monogamy as the essence of Divine Love: "this present edition is advanced as a set of suggestions helpful to the unbroken tradition of Jew and Christian that whereas the letter is of human the spirit is of Divine Love." Gill would later declare: "The love-song and the love-picture which take human love as the symbol of Divine Love are everywhere recurrent and such love, so taken, is still rightly the theme of themes for poets and picture-makers" (Art and Love).
The verses depicting Solomon's Harem are arranged in dramatic form, consisting of four acts and an epilogue. Gill designed and engraved 19 illustrations—including the title page's 'Holy Spirit as Dove'—with initials colored in red. Printed by Gibbings on handmade paper and numbered (310) in ink on the colophon. The Song of Songs is notable for the symmetry between text and image, a hallmark of the Golden Cockerel Press: "The harmony between type and blocks is a constant theme of Gibbings, which he thought especially successful in the Song of Songs. The continuing attempts to perfect this harmony led to the success of The Four Gospels" (Christopher Skelton). A 20th illustration ('Stay Me with Apples') was omitted from the text and appeared instead in the prospectus. Evan Gill. Bibliography of Eric Gill, 275; Chanticleer. A Bibliography of the Golden Cockerel Press, 31; Skelton. Eric Gill: The Engravings.
Price: $1,850.00