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Cloth-backed patterned boards (the paper from a 1930s design by Olive Openshaw and taken from a plate prepared by Paul Kershaw). Edition limited to 100 numbered copies set in Koch-Kursive, "the very type first used by the Curwen Press in 1926 and rescued by Ian Mortimer on its closure in 1983", and printed by Miles Wigfield. First printing of this never-performed play (or opera) written c1912 by Forrest Reid - who intended the piece to be "danced rather than acted", writes Colin Cruise in his introduction, suggesting that Reid was harking back to Oscar Wilde's Salome (1894). The landscape is not the Holy Land, but Ireland: "A pastoral country: green, with dark hills in the distance". Further, says Cruise, by introducing "a Satyr, or Pan", creeping out from a thicket, Reid transforms the biblical text, inserting a subversive note of paganism, a "rampant sexuality". Cruise notes, "Stanzas from The Song of Solomon were a feature of several Aesthetic Movement works, notably that of Simeon Solomon who quotes from the Songs in his prose-poem A Vision of Love Revealed in Sleep (1871) . . . The displacement of King Solomon in the dramatization is more shocking than we might at first think. It suggests an aristocracy based on feeling rather than social status. Here, Reed provides us with a new reading of the verses. His carefully constructed plot offers a new impulse for the singing of these famous songs." Tyrone Guthrie planned a production for the BBC, but it fell through. Howard Ferguson considered setting it to music but turned it down; it is from Ferguson's copy of the text that this is printed. Ten years in the planning and two in the printing, Miles Wigfield's book is tall and comely, and Jane Lydbury's six wood-engravings, printed from the block, are most striking. "How beautiful are thy feet with shoes, / O prince's daughter! / The joints of thy thighs are like jewels. / Thy neck is as the tower of ivory, / Thine eyes like the fishpools of Heshbon. / How fair and how pleasant art thou for delights!". Seller Inventory # 4XM10006
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