POEMS

London: George Bell & Sons, 1905. No. 2 OF 75 NUMBERED COPIES printed on Japanese Vellum. 220 x 145 mm. (8 3/4 x 5 3/4"). 1 p.l., x, 402 pp., [3] leaves.
LOVELY SCARLET MOROCCO BY THE BENNETT BOOK STUDIOS (stamp-signed in gilt on front turn-in), covers with gilt-ruled border and floral cornerpieces surrounding sprays of roses with gilt stems and leaves and white leather onlaid flowers with gilt detailing, raised bands, compartments with gilt lettering or with central gilt flower surrounded by a dense border of gilt floral tools, gilt-ruled turn-ins, top edge gilt, others untrimmed. In a (slightly faded) red oil cloth dust wrapper and felt-lined slipcase. With 18 full-page illustrations and numerous vignettes by Eleanor Fortescue Brickdale. ◆THE BINDING VIRTUALLY AS NEW, AND THE CONTENTS JUST AS GOOD.

Offered in an elegant and untouched onlaid binding, this is a deluxe edition on luxurious paper, containing some of Tennyson' best-known poems, with illustrations by a pioneering woman artist. The binding is the fine work of Bennett Book Studios, established in New York in the late 1920s by bookman and binder Whitman Bennett. This workshop established a reputation for transforming rare books sold by Bennett from drab to desirable "Bennett copies." When Bennett (1884-1968) developed health issues in the late 1940s, his son Josiah Quincy Bennett took over the bindery and ran it from 1946 to 1950. The Pre-Raphaelite-influenced illustrations here are by painter and watercolorist Eleanor Fortescue Brickdale (1872-1945). She began her studies at the Crystal Palace School of Arts before being admitted to the Royal Academy of Arts in 1897; by the following year, DNB notes, "she published her first illustrations, line drawings for Joseph Arthur Gibbs's 'A Cotswold Village' (1898)," becoming one of the few women doing commercial illustration work. Elected an associate of the Royal Society of Painters in Water Colours in 1901, she became the first woman member of the Institute of Painters in Oils the following year. Soon, she was a sought-after book illustrator, producing both line drawings (as here) and watercolors that would be reproduced as color plates. Although it does not bear any ex-libris, this perfectly preserved volume comes from the collection of American bibliophile and long-standing Grolier Club member David Allen Fraser (1911-2003)..