Shelley.

Doves Press, Hammersmith, 1914

“Cleanly printed from first to last” as Cobden-Sanderson remarked on ‘Shelley’. A very good copy of 200 printed on paper from a total edition of 212 copies (12 on vellum).

Description: Original full limp vellum with title in gilt on spine. Octavo: 24 × 17 cm; pp. 181. Printed in black and red on Doves hand-made paper, top edge cut, fore and lower edges trimmed. Inner pastedown stamped ‘The Doves Bindery’. ¶

Ref.: Cobden-Sanderson 1922, 142; Tidcombe DP35

Condition: Volume is near fine, with clean boards, straight corners without rubbing. Pages tightly bound throughout, pages 102–103 and 106–[107] show some yellow discolourations (verso of gathering g1, obviously an incident during printing), edges slightly spotted. But otherwise, a very good, clean copy.

Notes: The Shelley print was a tough nut to crack. By May 1914, when Shelley was printed, Cobden-Sanderson had recovered from his long illness, but he had become over-sensitive about the quality of the presswork. He blamed his age for the imperfections he thought were there, and for his ‘growing inability to energize the Press to its fingertips’. In the end, however, he found the prints were ‘on the whole quite “all right” – cleanly printed from first to last’ (Tidcombe, 2002). It is all the more surprising, given Cobden-Sanderson’s pedantry, that a copy with such a paper defect should have come into circulation at all.