Beschreibung:

TENNYSON, Alfred, Lord (1809-1892). In Memoriam. London: C.Whittingham & Co. for Kegan Paul, Trench & Co., 1883. 8° (156 x 93mm). Half-title. Title in red and black. Portrait frontispiece. BINDING DESIGNED BY T.J.COBDEN-SANDERSON, bound by Charles Wilkinson finished by Charles McLeish, Sen., at the Doves bindery, in 1898: green morocco gilt, the covers with a close overall design of stylised tendrils, daisyheads and dots, the spine in six compartments with raised bands, lettered in one, the others with a repeat pattern using the same elements as the covers, gilt turn-ins, g.e. (slight splits to joints), signed on the lower turn-in: The Doves Bindery 18 C-S 98, modern morocco-backed box. A VERY FINE DOVES BINDING, FINISHED BY MCLEISH, ONE OF THE FOREMOST BRITISH FINISHERS, AFTER A FAVOURED DESIGN BY COBDEN-SANDERSON. He first used this design on a binding of the same work in 1886. It was his first attempt to produce a design which would reflect the contents of the work. (Strangely, according to F.B. Adams in Bookbindings by T.J.Cobden-Sanderson [Pierpont Morgan Library, 1969, exhibit no.23] he appears to have been inspired by the wrong poem: 'especially those lines "in which Tithonus, immortal and grown old, bemoans his fate at the threshold of the Dawn, immortal and for ever young, and envies the 'grassy barrows of the happier dead,'" here represented by "bands of daisies, barrow-like, band upon band" ("Bookbinding," English Illustrated Magazine .)': Tithonus is the eponymous hero of another of Tennyson's works and does not reappear in In Memoriam . After a relatively unsuccessful attempt to improve on the design in the following year, he returned to the same tools for a copy of Shakespeare's plays for his four-year old son in 1888. In 1893 he used a slightly altered form for a Doves binding on Shakespeare's Sonnets (see Doheny: sale Christie's New York May 19, 1989 lot 2256), and finally the present example: perhaps the finest, and certainly a synthesis of the ideas explored in the earlier designs.