The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, in Seven Parts

London: Printed for Allen and Richard Lane, 1945 With 5 color plate drawings by Duncan Grant. Limited edition. One of 700 copies. Finely bound in blue Niger leather, with a ship medallion in gilt to front board, gilt lettering to spine, top edge gilt, and handmade paper. Near fine, with light toning to spine, bright gilt, light offsetting to edges of endpapers, and Henry Sotheran bookseller label to front pastedown. Overall, a sleek and gorgeously illustrated copy. The Rime of the Ancient Mariner is the longest poem by Samuel Tayler Coleridge. It was first published in his and Wordsworth's collaborative work, Lyrical Ballads (1798), one of the most important (truncated) books of poetry from the Romanticism Era, thought by many to have started the Romanticism movement in England. The Rime of the Ancient Mariner tells the story of an elderly mariner who has been lost at sea with his crew and is led to safe waters by an albatross. When he kills the albatross, the mariner is cursed with a fate worse than death; after watching his crew die, he is condemned to wander the earth eternally, telling his story to fellow sailors as a cautionary tale. Duncan Grant (1885 - 1978) was a Scottish painter and designer, and an important member of the Bloomsbury Group, whose other members included his cousin Lytton Strachey, Virginia Woolf and her sister Vanessa Bell, John Maynard Keynes, and Roger Fry. Grant had a long and creative relationship with Vanessa Bell, and the two had a child together in 1918. . Limited. Full-Leather. Near Fine. Illus. by Grant, Duncan. (Inventory #: STC006)