The Poetical Works of Edgar Allan Poe; The Bells by Poe, Edgar Allan - 1912, and see description

This is, in fact, the first trade edition of The Bells And Other Poems, with 28 color plates by Edmund Dulac, bound from leftover stock by the publisher Hodder and Stoughton, and released under this title during and after the First World War (see below). The endpapers, with bells on them, are also from the 1912 edition. The title page reads, surely enough, The Bells And Other Poems. In point of fact, Hodder and Stoughton were still finding uses for this old stock as late as 1929, when a selection of pages and plates from the book were issued as a Christmas portfolio by the publishing trade magazine, The Bookman. While the date of this edition has been hard to pin down – copies are nearly randomly assigned dates from 1919 to 1925 -- its wartime nature is now established by Adelaide Field, who advances our knowledge by having inscribed the date of November 4, 1918 under her name on the ffep of this copy. That's exactly a week before Armistice Day. So there. This is a heavy, weighty quarto with an elaborately embossed and gilded front cover whose design, except for the gilt text, is the same as (and might even be) leftover stock from the 1912 American edition, only with different gilt and ink stamping on the embossed front cover design. The book is uncommonly well-designed inside and out and printed on unusually nice, thick paper. The plates feature printed tissue guards. Although unpaginated, it has about 240 pages. This copy has a solid, tight binding with very minor wear at the top and bottom of the spine. The spine gilt is better than the current photo suggests -- it's in the same condition as the front cover gilt. The boards have corner wear, invisible from either front or rear view, but there if you look for them. The top left corner has a little spot of something red, invisible from a foot or so away. I'm meticulous, btw. The interior looks as if Adelaide Field never opened her book. Such being the case, it's unclear whether anybody ever noticed until just now that the pages for the poem, The Bells, were bound in upside-down, along with one of that poem's two plates and its tissue guard. Well, they were. Poe is spooky.