The Blessed Damozel. Reprinted from The Germ

LIMITED EDITION, 1 of 450 (510 in total) copies printed on Kelmscott hand-made paper. Small 4to, pp. xiii, [i blank], 32, [2] printed in orange and black, decorated initials and designs after Charles Ricketts + photogravure frontis, after DGR's 1874 crayon and chalk portrait study of Alexa Wilding produced for Lord Mount-Temple, printed on Japan vellum. Original blue paper boards, ivory title labels to spine and front board, lettered in black and red (toned). Edges untrimmed, a few pages unopened. Gentle pushing to extremities, edges darkened. Gently toned, else, clean, tight and bright. In the plain original dust jacket: heavily toned, esp. to spine, a little soiled, chipped at extremities. Very good/ good+ A rather splendid copy of the attractive 1901 Thomas B Mosher limited edition of Dante Gabriel Rossetti's most famous poem The Blessed Damozel, featuring the exquisite photogravure frontispiece, after DGR's 1874 crayon and chalk portrait study of Alexa Wilding as the blessed damozel,commissioned by Thomas Bird Mosher for this edition, printed in orange and black with designs after Charles Rickets, and decked in the scarce plain original dust jacket. While this Mosher edition does not attribute its designs to Charles Ricketts, Peter Bishop has highlighted the "decorative similarities" between it and the 1898 Hacon & Ricketts edition, including the "same alternating black and red Ricketts initials and text, the same red rules as the two-page openings of the book following the half-titles, and the same red Roman numerals of each stanza"; differences include type and page size and different dingbats. The edition is a "faithful reprint of the poem by Dante Gabriel Rossetti as it originally appeared in The Germ for February mdcccl," together with all textual variants from The Oxford and Cambridge magazine, 1856; DGR's Poems, 1870, and his Collected Works, 1886, plus extracts from reviews, support for and discussion of the poem by DGR's friends and contemporaries, Algernon Swinburne, William Morris, William Sharp and T. Hall Caine.…