John Dryden's Songs and Poems de Dryden, John

London: Golden Cockerel Press, 1957. “Selected, edited, and introduced by Gwyn Jones. Collotype reproductions of  8 water-colour paintings and 11 pencil drawings by Lavinia Blyth [Leslie Blanche].” Folio, 80 pp., 18-point Golden Cockerel type on handmade paper. One hundred numbered copies were issued in three-quarter “red and green morocco with a second set of eight pictures and eight of the drawings... 400 [numbered] copies in quarter red morocco with grey canvas boards” (Cock-A-Hoop, #206, p. 40).  Our unnumbered copy of Songs and Poems acquired in sheets, uncut and untrimmed, in eight sections-- Introduction, Parts I- VII, with one colour plate and drawing each.

Text pages 40 cm x 27 cm, plates 38.2 cm x 27 cm (as against 37.5 cm x 25.5 cm). It’s hard to say for certain, but this is likely a late proof, with no markings or notes (or maybe at the Chiswick Press the printer said, “Oops, Christopher, looks like we printed 501.”) Bound, as found, in dark green cloth over complimentary marbled paper covered boards, gilt title to spine; fine contrasting pale green endpapers.

In Cock-A-Hoop Christopher Sandford says, “Dryden, I felt, merited a Golden Cockerel edition, and a glorious one. So I printed this selection from his prodigious out-put on a large page, in Eric Gill’s 18-point Golden Cockerel type.” And later, “...if I wanted to do a book in a certain style thus it had to be done. And so in due course it was finished and was for me a most satisfying book, maybe my best, and one I would be happy to be remembered by” (41).  A swan song.  As new.