Three Evening Prayers
San Francisco: The Colt Press, 1940. Limited edition. Octavo (8 inches tall), original tan cloth decorated with red-and-green floral pattern, uncut. Bookplate, very faint toning to spine, mild tanning to blank flyleaves. A nearly fine copy. Item #1640
"PRAYERS COMPOSED BY MY EVER DEAR SISTER JANE"
Fine Press limited edition of Three Evening Prayers—attributed to Jane Austen and printed here for the first time by The Colt Press. "Familiar and essential strands in the close texture of Jane Austen's family life" and a window into the domestic spirituality of Georgian Anglicanism. A fine copy of a beautiful, and uncommon, book.
Celebrated for her novels examining the family life of the English countryside, Austen's depictions of churchmen capture a sense of Anglican spirituality at a particularly low ebb in the years before the revival of the Oxford Movement. Austen created "quite an album of clerics—pleasant and unpleasant, like Mr. Bernard Shaw's plays—but all having one common bond, that of utter absence of any spirituality or any sense of the responsibility which they assumed for the care of souls" (Bertram C.A. Windle). The Colt Press was founded by William Matson Roth and Jane Grabhorn, the noted printer and typographer (and wife of Robert Grabhorn of the Grabhorn Press). The Introduction by Matson Roth provides a careful description of the composition and preservation of the Austen family prayers and a chronicle of their travels in the market before they came to "reside, most carefully kept, in the safe at The Colt Press."
The text, printed in capital letters and ornamented in red, consists of Prayer One. "Give Us Grace," Prayer Two. "Almighty God!" Prayer Three. "Father of Heaven!" A facsimile manuscript page of the prayers, written in ink in various hands and "passed down within the Austen family," is tipped in at the rear. Matson Roth notes that Jane Austen was born into the Church of England. "Her father, we will remember, was a clergyman, rector of Steverton and Deane. After his death, James, Jane's eldest brother, became rector of Steverton in his father's place. Another brother, Henry, finally took orders...and it is in his hand that the second and the first part of the third prayer appears. Jane's mother had herself been the daughter of a clergyman." Designed by Jane Grabhorn, the edition of 300 copies was printed by Lawton Kennedy in March 1940. This copy is numbered 94 in ink on the colophon.
Price: $300.00