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Edition deluxe, number 215 of 550 copies signed by Arthur Rackham. Large quarto (11 11/16 x 8 7/8 inches; 297 x 225 mm.). xviii, 76, [1, blank], [1, printer's device] pp. Twenty-four color plates mounted on brown paper, with descriptive tissue guards, thirty-seven drawings in black and white. Publisher's quarter vellum over cream-colored parchment boards. Front cover and spine pictorially stamped and lettered in gilt, top edge gilt, others uncut. Pictorial endpapers in blue and white. Spine darkened, slight 'toning' to parchment boards, corners bumped, board edges rubbed, internally clean. Housed in a tan cloth slipcase. "Another, more important, publication of Rackham's in 1921 was a long-delayed edition of Milton's Comus, the drawings for which, begun before the war, deserve to rank with his best work of that earlier period." (Hudson). Comus (A Mask Presented at Ludlow Castle, 1634) is a masque in honour of chastity, written by John Milton. It was first presented on Michaelmas, 1634, before John Egerton, 1st Earl of Bridgewater at Ludlow Castle in celebration of the Earl's new post as Lord President of Wales. Known colloquially as Comus, the masque's actual full title is A Mask presented at Ludlow Castle, 1634: on Michelmas night, before the Rt Hon. Iohn Earl of Bridgewater, Viscount Brackly, Lord President of Wales, and one of His Maiesties most honorable privie councill. Comus was printed anonymously in 1637, in a quarto issued by bookseller Humphrey Robinson; Milton included the work in his Poems of 1645 and 1673. Milton's text was later used for a highly successful masque by the musician Thomas Arne in 1738, which then ran for more than seventy years in London. Arthur Rackham (1867-1939) is perhaps the most acclaimed and influential illustrator of the Golden Age of Illustration. A prolific artist even from his youth, Rackham got his start as an illustrator working for the Westminster Budget Newspaper (1892). Over the next few years, he took on more and more commissions for children's books, hitting his career high in the first three decades of the twentieth century. Rackham turned his imaginative pen to every classic-from Shakespeare to Dickens to Poe. Latimore and Haskell, pp. 54-55. Riall, p. 143. Very Good +.
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