Auserlesene Lieder, Gedichte und Balladen. London, Doves Press, 1916.

One of 10 copies on vellum, from a total edition of 185 (175 on paper). 226 pp., printed in red and black with marginal titles. Original flexible vellum binding signed by the Doves Bindery, in slipcase. Small quarto (234 × 168 mm).

By 1916 Cobden-Sanderson had entered the terminal phase of the press; this was in fact the last book it printed. Cobden-Sanderson predicted it would be "a beautiful book, perhaps the best I have done, as it will be the last," the moment bound up with the destruction of the Doves type in the Thames. A Goethe printed on vellum in that year belongs to the austere, controlled final phase of the press. The paper issue belongs to the normal Doves collecting field; the vellum issue belongs to the highest tier of rarity.

John Quinn (1870–1924) was one of the decisive Anglo-American collector-patrons of literary modernism, associated with Yeats, Pound, Eliot and Joyce; a Doves Goethe on vellum from his library shows Goethe's canon passing through the same collecting world that helped shape literary modernism. Osmond Kessler Fraenkel (1888–1983), the American civil-liberties lawyer and long-time ACLU counsel, adds a second distinguished twentieth-century provenance.

PROVENANCE

John Quinn (1870–1924), American lawyer, collector and patron of literary modernism; Osmond Kessler Fraenkel (1888–1983), American civil-liberties lawyer and ACLU counsel.

The Heribert Tenschert Collection.

REFERENCES

Marianne Tidcombe, The Doves Press (British Library, 2002); Tomkinson, A Select Bibliography of the Principal Modern Presses; John Rylands Library, Doves Press holdings; The Complete Catalogue of the Library of John Quinn (Anderson Galleries, New York, 1923–24).