The Blessed Damozel (Signed limited edition)

Maine: Thomas B. Mosher, 1901. First Variorum edition. Number 2 of 10 copies printed on vellum (this being No. 2) signed by Thomas Mosher, with designs by Charles Ricketts. Small quarto (5 3/4 x 5 1/4 inches; 146 x 134 mm.). [i-v, blank], vi, limitation, [inserted photogravure portrait], xiii, [i, blank], [1]- 32, [2], [4, blank] pp. The photogravure frontispiece is after the author's 1874 portrait of Alexa Wilding for Lord Mount-Temple. Publishers vellum over boards, spine lettered in gilt (gilt somewhat faded), remains of original tan silk ties. Spine a little discolored and with minimal loss to extreme top, otherwise a wonderful copy. The Arthur A (truncated) Houghton copy with his bookplate on rear paste-down.

The famous Pre-Raphaelite artist and poet Gabriel Charles Dante Rossetti's most-celebrated poem, The Blessed Damozel, was written when he was 19. It would remain a favorite subject—he continuously revised the poem up until his death and used the theme for his painting of the same name (1871-1878). Inspired in part by Edgar Allan Poe's poem The Raven, Rossetti inverted the story of a grieving lover and with the narrative unfolding from the perspective of the deceased damozel looking down at her lover from heaven. It was first published in the Pre-Raphaelite journal The Germ. The text is here printed as it first appeared in the February 1850 issue of The Germ with, neatly printed below, the variants present in the 1856 Oxford and Cambridge Magazine, the 1870 Poems, and the 1886 Collected Works. Bishop notes the decorative similarities between this edition and that of Hacon & Ricketts in 1900, including the “same alternating black and red Ricketts initials and text, the same red rules as the two-page openings of the book following the half-titles, and the same red Roman numerals of each stanza,” although Mosher here opts for smaller type, a larger page, and different dingbats, with his printer's device prominently displayed on the title-leaf verso.

Hatch, Mosher, 184; Bishop, Mosher, 47. (Inventory #: 6416)