Nine Sonnets Written at Oxford
Boston: Copeland & Day, 1895. 12 mo. (6 5/8 inches tall), stitched in original gray printed wrappers, 16 pages. Gentle creasing to edges. About Fine. Item #1867
"ETERNAL ALCHEMIST, UPRAISE, ENTHRONE / SOME PRESENCE OF SALVATION, LATER BLOWN / FROM THAT SAME SEED OF FIRE WHICH NEVER DIED"
Rare first edition of Louise Imogen Guiney's Nine Sonnets Written at Oxford—designed by Bertram Grosvenor Goodhue and published by Copeland and Day for Christmas 1895. A beautiful copy, with the original publisher's "With the Compliments" slip laid-in.
Brought up in Protestant New England, Guiney's inspirations were English and Catholic and she left Boston for Oxford. "Louise in England had seen something she had not found in her native land, a literary cause, an aesthetic, an inspiration which called forth her complete enthusiasm...From then on nothing in America could hold her affection...For twenty years after 1900 she lived almost continously at Oxford...she enjoyed the friendship of Katharine Tynan, Mrs. Shorter, Lionel Johnson...and moved about in the society of the Alice Meynell group" (Calvert Alexander).
"The result of a walking tour in England with her biographer Alice Brown" (Calvert Alexander). Nine Sonnets consists of I. The Tow Path, II. The Old Dial of Corpus, III. Ad Antiquarium Quidam, IV. On the Pre-Reformation Churches about Oxford, V. On the Same (Continued), VI. A December Walk, VII. Rooks in New College Garden, VIII. A Last View, IX. Retrieval. Nine Sonnets is treasured for its fabulous double-spread illustrated title page by Goodhue, the primary designer at Copeland and Day, along with decorative initials throughout the text and the firm’s colophon, with their motto: "Sicut Lilium Inter Spinas" (A Lily among the Thorns). Printed at the University Press in Cambridge Massachusetts, this collaboration between Guiney and Goodhue was privately issued "for them and their Friends and for Herbert Copeland and F.H. Day and their Friends at Christmas." Calvert Alexander. The Catholic Literary Revival: Three Phases in its Development from 1845 to the Present.
Price: $750.00