POEMS (DANIEL PRESS). BINYON, LAURENCE Poetry,Private Press

245 x 168 mm. (9 5/8 x 6 1/4"). 6 p.l., 52 pp., [4] leaves. Pleasing modern navy blue morocco, covers with gilt fillet and blind roll border, raised bands, spine gilt in compartments with lily centerpiece, gilt lettering, edges untrimmed. Original printed paper wrappers bound in. Housed in a navy buckram slipcase. Verso of front paper wrapper with book label of J. O. Edwards. Madan 35. Cave, "The Private Presses," pp. 100-02. Occasional minor foxing, but A FINE COPY, clean and fresh internally, the untrimmed leaves with generous margins, and the binding as new. This is a specially bound copy of a collection of 26 previously unpublished poems, issued in the kind of unpretentiously elegant Daniel Press edition characterized by Roderick Cave as "a precursor of the Arts and Crafts presses in spirit and taste." The Daniel Press was run by Reverend Charles Henry O. Daniel (1836-1919), who is called by Cave "by far the most important of all [the] . . . Victorian printers for pleasure." With the help of his wife and two daughters, Daniel produced 60-odd pieces, mostly poetic and theological, throughout his long career as deacon, scholar, and eventually provost of Worcester College, Oxford. He began printing in Frome before starting his press in Oxford in 1874, nearly two decades before the founding of the Kelmscott Press. The Daniel Press is not distinguished solely by its status as an early private press; its graceful, scholarly, and restrained corpus of works was responsible for a renewed interest in the Fell types, which had been bequeathed to the Oxford University Press, after having been ignored for many years, and then taken up by Daniel for continuing use at his press. The present work is printed in the Fell small pica italic on handmade French Rives paper, and the heavy, creamy paper with the sharp type impressions and wide margins make this an exceptionally pleasing publication. The English poet, dramatist, artist, and art scholar Laurence Binyon (1869-1943) began his career in the Department of Printed Books of the British Museum, writing catalogues for the museum and art monographs for his own benefit. He ultimately became the museum's leading specialist in Chinese and Japanese color prints, but maintained a steady poetic output throughout his career, eventually spending a year following his retirement from the museum as Harvard's Charles Eliot Norton professor of poetry. Our copy is from the library of James O. Edwards, best known for his collection of English verse from the second half of the 18th century.