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4to. Five sheets of handmade paper loose in portfolio, (printed paper label), with extra title and "Contributors" sheets; one corner of portfolio slightly creased. Edition limited to 55 numbered copies, each broadside signed by author and artist. The Starwheel Press was the child of George Szirtes, the poet, artist and translator, and his wife, the artist Clarissa Upchurch. "We ran it between 1976 and 1986 from our house in Hitchin," he told Cameron Self in an interview for the website Literary Norfolk, "on a big letterpress machine and an etching press in the cellar. It existed to bring together artists and mostly well-known poets (we contributed as artists, I only once produced poems for it). The poets included Peter Porter, Anne Stevenson, Kevin Crossley-Holland, Peter Scupham, Craig Raine, Wendy Cope and many others. There were five individual sheets of poem with etchings, in a card portfolio, all signed and hand-printed. We did one portfolio a year, working right through summer, not paying ourselves. The editions ran to 55 copies. They were sold at book, not art prices, and naturally they disappeared into collections." Spring Offensive's CONTRIBUTORS sheet begins with "Wendy Cope Teaches in a London school. A section of her work will appear in Poetry Introduction 5 to be published by Faber and Faber early in 1982." Cope had published a first, slim pamphlet, Across the City, with John Cotton's Priapus Press the year previously. She shared Poetry Introduction 5 (1982) with Blake Morrison, Medbh McGuckian, Michael Hofmann and others, but her first collection with Faber, Making Cocoa with Kingsley Amis, did not come out until 1986. It was the book that made her name. Cope here contributes "Autumn", Christopher Hope "Spring Snow", Jeremy Hooker "On a Child's Painting", Jenny Joseph "May Light" and Lotte Kramer "Faces". Seller Inventory # T100637
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