Scots Ballads (Signed limited edition)

London: Seeley, Service & Co. Limited, 1939. First edition. Fine. One of sixty copies signed by the artist (only fifty of which were for sale). Publisher's deluxe full vellum titled in gilt. Folio. [81] ff., fully illustrated with black-and-white plates, calligraphic text, and elaborate head- and tail-pieces inspired by manuscript illumination. A lovely, Fine copy with the publisher's prospectus (reproducing two illustrations and a page of text) laid in.

This elegant production was the last significant book illustrated by the Scottish painter, limner, and designer Robert Burns (1869 - 1941), not to be confused with the poet of the same name. Burns was a skilled decorative artist associated both with Arts and Crafts styles and the Scottish cultural revival movement of Sir Patrick Geddes. Burns' Scots Ballads, as it appears here, was the result of decades of attempts to produce an illustrated edition of the traditional Scottish stories that inspired his art - Burns' original plan was to create a lavish three-volume illuminated edition in colors and gold, but it proved too expensive to reproduce widely, and he reworked the project into the present version with his striking black-and-white illustrations, calligraphic text, and a glossary of Scots terms. Scots Ballads was published in a regular edition of 320 copies (300 of which were for sale) and sixty signed deluxe copies in vellum (fifty of which were for sale). Fine.