I have been in the rare and antiquarian book business for over forty years; my family has been in the rare books business since 1876. Rare books are in my blood.
Collected Poems, The
London: Sidgwick & Jackson, Ltd., 1927. Item #06653
Rupert Brooke in an Unusual Neo-Medieval Sangorski Binding
BROOKE, Rupert. The Collected Poems. With a Memoir. London: Sidgwick & Jackson, Ltd., 1927.
Small octavo (7 3/8 x 4 7/8 inches; 188 x 124 mm.). clix, [1, blank], 159, [1] pp. With two inserted photogravure portraits.
Finely bound ca. 1950 by Sangorski & Sutcliffe in full warm chestnut morocco, covers bordered with a delicate gilt fillet, corners accented with small gilt rosettes. Upper cover lettered in gilt. Spine with five raised bands, incorporating a series of decorative yapp-style, blind-staped leather thongs laced through the joints and terminating in small quatrefoil ornaments - an intentional archaic revival feature recalling early limp vellum and medieval stationers’ bindings. Gilt board edges and turn-ins, characteristic S. & S. orange floral endleaves, all edges gilt. Spine lightly mellowed, otherwise a very fine and most attractive example.
The design is notably restrained for Sangorski & Sutcliffe’s mid-century production - eschewing the firm’s earlier jeweled exuberance in favor of a more tactile, neo-medieval simplicity, where the quality of the morocco and the sculptural laced spine provide the principal visual interest. Bindings of this type, with laced thong decoration, are uncommon within the firm’s output and display a conscious Arts and Crafts revival sensibility.
A handsome and unusual binding, combining traditional craftsmanship with a deliberately antiquarian design vocabulary.
Rupert Brooke (1887–1915) stands as one of the defining poetic voices of the early twentieth century and the most celebrated of the so-called “War Poets” at the outset of the First World War. Educated at Rugby and King’s College, Cambridge, Brooke became associated with the Bloomsbury circle and was admired as much for his striking good looks and charisma as for his lyrical gifts.
His reputation rests largely on the sequence of sonnets written in 1914, particularly “The Soldier”, which captured the idealism and patriotic fervor of the war’s opening months. Unlike the later, more disillusioned voices of Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon, Brooke’s poetry reflects a romantic, almost pastoral vision of sacrifice and national identity.
He died prematurely in 1915, aged just twenty-seven, of blood poisoning while en route to Gallipoli, and was buried on the Greek island of Skyros. His early death, combined with the elegiac tone of his finest poems, helped cement his enduring image as the embodiment of a lost, idealistic generation.
Price: $550.00