edited by Damian Atkinson
To many W. E. Henley has long been consigned to the literary backwater of the late nineteenth century as a minor poet who produced the now hackneyed ‘Out of the night that covers me’.
W. E. Henley met Robert Louis Stevenson, when Henley was a patient in the Edinburgh Infirmary in 1875, and they formed a close personal relationship which also developed into a literary one. Their collaboration on four plays was unsuccessful, with Henley being convinced their fortunes would be made. Henley saw the relationship under threat from Stevenson’s wife Fanny and a quarrel over Fanny’s apparent literary hijacking of a story by Katharine de Mattos led to a bitter quarrel and a permanent rift between the two.
Henley’s letters to Stevenson present us with an insight into their personal and literary relationship and also a feel of the period and show that Henley was a letter writer of some note.
Hardbound: 17.5 x 27.4 cm, 400 pp., illustrated.
ISBN 1 904201 11 3
£40.0 / $75.00
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Mark Samuels Lasner
Highly decorative in contrasting black and white, small in scale, and executed with an eye towards reproduction, the celebrated drawings of Aubrey Beardsley (1872-98) are ideally suited for use as bookplates. This informative book describes and illustrates for the first time forty plates made from his works. These include the three bookplates the artist actually designed for the purpose - for the physician and scholar John Lumsden Propert, for his patron Herbert Charles Pollitt, and for the poet Olive Custance, who married Oscar Wilde's lover, Lord Alfred Douglas.
Softbound: 15.6 x 23.4 cm, 108 pp., illustrated.
ISBN 1 904201 10 5
£12.50 / $25.00
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Molly Whittington-Egan
It was a hot summer's day in 1876, and the two young men, in their prime, were strolling around the ambages of a rectory garden. There were rose walks, and everywhere such white lilies.
The friends were close and confiding: they talked with passion of art, literature and religion, and other more intimate matters.
Baskets of strawberries were brought between sets of the new lawn-tennis. Oscar was awfully good at it - gangling, yet muscular and quick. He was in particularly fine spirits, because he has just got his First. Actually, he had never visited Frank's family at Bingham Rectory before...
Softbound: 15.6 x 23.4 cm, 112 pp., illustrated.
ISBN 1 904201 09 1
£12.50 / $25.00
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