Bay: A Book of Poems

Westminster: The Beaumont Press, 1919 Illustrated with hand colored woodcuts by Anne Estelle Rice. First edition, limited issue of 200 numbered copies, this being one of 50 copies printed on cartridge paper. Publisher's green cloth and yellow patterned boards, lettered in gilt. About fine, corners very lightly bumped, former owner's bookplate to the front pastedown, fresh interior. A beautiful copy. Roberts A12.b. An exceedingly rare publication, Bay was first published in several short print runs. This first edition is one of 200 copies, and only 50 copies, like this copy, are printed on cartridge paper with hand colored illustrations. According to the publisher, roughly 25 of the 50 cartridge paper copies were not sold due to an accident, lowering the total number of obtainable copies of Bay to 175 (63 of which are housed in institutional libraries' special collections) and making these copies the scarcest of the three variants. The remaining 150 copies are comprised of 120 copies printed on handmade paper (A12.a) and 30 printed on Japanese vellum and signed by the author and illustrator (A12.c). Bay is a collection of eighteen of Lawrence's poems, including "The Little Town at Evening," "After the Opera," "Bombardment," "Bread Upon the Waters," "Tommies in the Train," "War-Baby," and "Nostalgia," among others. As Roberts explains in his bibliography, these poems "comprise the greater part of Lawrence's literary reaction to the war." Notably, Bay was the first of Lawrence's books to be "issued in an expensive format from a private press," a practice he would continue with many of his subsequent works.. 1st Edition. Hard Cover. Fine. Illus. by Rice, Anne Estelle.