signed
1935 · London
by Poe, Edgar Allan.
4to. London: George G. Harrap & Co. Ltd., 1935. 4to, 318 pp. With 12 tipped-in color illustrations and text illustrations in black and white. Original publisher's gilt pictorial vellum, top edge gilt; bookplate on verso of front free endpaper. Backstrip discolored and a few plates slightly separating, but otherwise a very good copy with pages clean and unfoxed. § Edition de luxe, limited to 460 copies, signed by Rackham, this is copy number 143. Surely the best illustrated edition of Poe’s masterpiece ever published. Unusually dark subject matter for Rackham, he confessed to his model Marita Ross “that his pictures were now so horrible that he was beginning to frighten himself!” Though a far cry from his more familiar, whimsical works the illustrations are, as Hudson notes, “a revelation of the concealed power hinted at in Comus.” Hudson, Arthur Rackham, p. 140. Latimore & Haskell p.72.
(Inventory #: 124046)