Books and Manuscripts

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor
Poems Chosen Out of The Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge
(London: Kelmscott Press, 1896). First and limited edition, one of 300 copies. 8vo. iv, 100, (2) pp. Presentation copy, inscribed on front free endpaper by Kelmscott Press editor Frederick S. Ellis, "To my dear daughter Phillis Marion Paine, in anticipation of her birthday October 31. 1899. F.S. Ellis”. Printed in Golden type in black and in red. Original limp vellum with yapp edges, spine stamped in gilt; all edges untrimmed; original silk ties present; book-plate of avid private press collector Clarence B. Hanson, Jr. on front paste-down. Ransom, p. 239, Tompkinson p. 117

An excellent association copy. The Kelmscott Press’s Poems by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, inscribed by Kelmscott editor Frederick S. Ellis to his daughter Phyllis Marion Paine. Paine was an important contributor to the prestigious press who went unrecognized in her lifetime, but is now credited with the herculean feat of transcribing a substantial amount of Caxton's Golden Legend from its original medieval source material. William S. Peterson describes Phyllis’s contribution in The Kelmscott Press: A History of William Morris’s Typographical Adventure (1991): “The Cambridge University Library agreed to lend its Caxton Golden Legend, heavily insured, to Ellis, whose daughter Phyllis (later Mrs. Payne) then laboriously transcribed the entire book, so that the volume itself would not have to be touched by the inky hands of Morris’s printers. It was an heroic undertaking, for which she never received the public recognition she deserved, and the few surviving scraps of her manuscript confirm W.H. Bowden’s testimony that not one word of it was illegible.” (p. 207).

A near-fine copy.