Iphigenie auf Tauris. London, Doves Press, 1912.

Deluxe edition, one of 20 copies printed in two colours on snow-white vellum (Tidcombe DP28, Tomkinson 57 record 200 on paper, 20 on vellum, and 12 further vellum copies with gold initials by Graily Hewitt). 110 pp. and one leaf. Small quarto (230 × 165 mm).

Original orange-red morocco with gilt fillets to spine and covers, signed "The Doves Bindery C-S 1912" (pristine; binding and vellum text-block in exceptional state).

Few Goethe texts better suit the Doves ideal. Iphigenie auf Tauris is his most serene classical drama, Greek myth turned into a play of restraint, humane reason and reconciliation. The Doves Press, founded by Cobden-Sanderson with Emery Walker, pursued an equally severe ideal of pure typography and proportion. Cobden-Sanderson's principle that "the Book Beautiful" must be beautiful as a whole [Cobden-Sanderson, "The Book Beautiful," 1902] finds an exact embodiment here. The text's classical restraint and the press's typographic restraint clarify one another, Doves classicism and Goethe's classicism meeting in the authority of measured form.

It is distinct from both the paper edition and the 12-copy gilt-initial subgroup, and is bound by the Doves Bindery as a unified Arts and Crafts object.

PROVENANCE

The Heribert Tenschert Collection.

REFERENCES

Tidcombe DP28; Tomkinson 57; Marianne Tidcombe, The Doves Press (British Library, 2002); Colin Franklin, The Private Presses (1969); T. J. Cobden-Sanderson, "The Book Beautiful," in Ecce Mundus (Doves Press, 1902); Alexander Turnbull Library, Doves Press Iphigenie record.