"All of the [Doves] Keats & Shelley Vellum Copies Are Now Sold," Two of them, Fondly, to a Former Binding Pupil and Her Husband

A SUBSTANTIAL MANUSCRIPT LETTER FROM T. J. COBDEN-SANDERSON, WITH ORIGINAL DOVES PRESS RECEIPT AND FOUR PAGES OF RUBBINGS FOR SPECIAL DOVES BINDINGS.

(DOVES PRESS). COBDEN-SANDERSON, T. J.

(March 15, 1917). 260 x 202 mm. (10 1/8 x 8").

Contained in an envelope addressed to Edgar S. Oppenheimer (see below) from the Chiswick Bookshop, postmarked January 20, 1950. See Tidcombe, The Doves Press, pp. 74- 81; Reminiscences of Newell Sill Jenkins, p. 400. In excellent condition, surprisingly without tears or soiling.

This small collection of Doves Press material, which includes a manuscript letter from Cobden-Sanderson to the husband of a former student, recalls for us a fond connection between the pre-eminent English bookbinder of the period and an aspiring one, and provides a glimpse into the sunset days of Cobden-Sanderson's career. It consists of the letter (approximately 250 words long), a typed transcript of the letter (the letter being one which poses the challenge to legibility frequently seen in Cobden-Sandersons' penmanship), the original envelope (addressed in Cobden-Sanderson's hand), a Doves Press receipt, a pencilled list of purchases, and, most important, rubbings of the two bindings made for deluxe Doves vellum-printed books that are at the center of the correspondence. The receipt records the sale of copies of the Doves Press Shelley and Keats, both printed on vellum, to Dr. T. Leslie Shear (1880-1945) as well as paper copies of "The Prelude," Goethe's "Gedichte," and a Doves Press "Catalogue Raisonné." The total bill came to the considerable sum of £88 4s (about $420 at the time), with £73 10s going for the two finely bound vellum books. The four pages of rubbings are for the bindings on the Keats and Shelley volumes, as recorded in Tidcombe (see "The Dove's Bindery" Nos. 779 and 780). Shear, our buyer, was an archaeologist best known for his excavations of the Athenian agora and the city of Corinth. At the time of this purchase, he was teaching Greek at Columbia University, and later went on to be a Professor of Classical Archaeology at Princeton for 25 years. Although the letter here is addressed to "My dear Leslie," the most important connection between Cobden-Sanderson and the Shears was through the professor's wife, Nora Jenkins Shear (1872-1927), an artist, later an archaeologist with her husband--and an aspiring bookbinder. As the unmarried Nora Jenkins, she had been one of a significant group of women, many of them American, allowed into (and able to afford) the elite bookbinding course offered by Cobden-Sanderson in his Hammersmith studio during the final decade of the 19th and first decade of the 20th centuries (for example, Evelyn Hunter Nordhoff, Emily Preston, Ellen Gates Starr). According to her father's memoirs, Nora attended the course at the urging of her decorative arts professors in Paris, but never seriously pursued bookbinding, preferring to focus her energies on archaeology. However, she formed a personal friendship with Cobden-Sanderson during her time in London: the two maintained a correspondence lasting over 15 years, and several books with personal inscriptions to Nora from Cobden-Sanderson are retained in libraries or have appeared on the market (see, for example, Tidcomb DP 8, DPE 89). She owned one of only 25 copies of the Cobden-Sanderson print "In Bookbinding, then, as in Other Crafts" (Tidcombe DPE 83), which now resides at the Bancroft Library. In the present cordial letter, in which the writer refers to Nora as "R." (a nickname or inside joke?), Cobden-Sanderson says that he looks forward to an upcoming letter from Nora and to a visit from the Shears, during which they would pick up their purchases: "I will keep watch on your books against your soon coming." This piece of correspondence and associated receipt, dated 13 March 1917, are highly representative of the period at the end of Cobden-Sanderson's career. The "Catalogue Raisonné" purchased by the Shears was the final printing of the press, and the Shelley and Keats were among the last, if not the very last, copies sold directly by Cobden-Sanderson. We know this because he wrote to bookseller Thomas Bain on April 5, 1917 that "all the Keats & Shelley vellum copies are now sold, even my own, except one Keats. Which for the moment I shall cling to." Our letter includes a reference to the fact that Cobden-Sanderson was selling most of his possessions at this time, largely to be certain that his wife, Annie, had enough money to live off after his death: "it is kind of her [Nora] to be going to see the Whistlers [i.e., paintings] and shall be glad to have her advice and opinion: but I suspect they will have been carried off before this letter arrives, as Annie has made new arrangements for their sale by a lady whose name unfortunately I do not remember." Cobden-Sanderson died in September of 1922. These documents belonged to bibliophile Edgar S. Oppenheimer (d. 1959), a member of the Grolier Club, Fellow of the Pierpont Morgan Library, and a trustee of the Yale Library. His library primarily focused on children's literature, but also included a significant collection of Rainer Maria Rilke material, which he donated to Yale in 1958. (ST21107)

Price: $3,500.00