Hadrian the Seventh: A Romance

8vo. Publisher's dark purple cloth, with the decorated design by Rolfe in white to cover. Gilt titles to spine. To rear, bound in on a different paper stock and dated September 1903, 32 pages of publisher's advertisements, now slightly toned. Top edges gilt. With the author's designed device to title page. Rolphe's masterpiece and still in print, features George Rose, its protagonist, in a not so thinly veiled self-portrait of the author, who lives out a wish fulfilment fantasy of being elected Pope. A previous owner has written across the front free endpapers in a small, neat contemporary hand a key to the main characters in the novel. To verso of the ffep the wonderful curse bookplate of C. J. Peacock, clearly not the writer of the notes, which offers the invocation, "who folds a leafe downe ye divel toaste browne / who makes marke or blotte ye divel roaste hot / who stealeth thisse boke ye divel shall cooke". His bookplate is found in a number of collections and on copies for sale. The gilt to the spine is bright, the boards are clean, with minor rubs to lower tips and spine ends and less so, upper tips. The prelims have some very faint mottling, the page edges are clean and free of spotting and marks. Overall a very well kept copy, bright, firm and square. One of 1500 copies, of which the first 700 copies featured the white design on the "dull purple cloth", the next 450 copies having the design stamped in blind. Woolf, A 6a. …