‘A TRIUMPH OF SIMPLICITY AND RESTRAINT’

Pervigilium Veneris. 

Hammersmith, ‘printed by T.J. Cobden-Sanderson at the Doves Press,’ 1910. 

4to, pp. [2], 7, [1 (blank)], with preliminary and final blanks; printed in red and black in Doves type on laid paper watermarked ‘CS EW 1902’ and ‘TJCS 1910’; small mark at foot of colophon, nonetheless a very good copy; bound in vellum by the Doves Bindery (stamp to lower pastedown), spine lettered directly in gilt, sewn with green thread on 4 tapes; vellum bowing slightly with a few scattered spots.

£950

Approximately:
US $1181€1137

Add to basket Make an enquiry

Added to your basket:
Pervigilium Veneris. 

Checkout now

One of 150 copies on paper of the elusive Pervigilium Veneris, in the original Doves Bindery vellum, ‘a triumph of simplicity and restraint’ (Tidcombe). 

T. J. Cobden-Sanderson (1840–1922) established the Doves Bindery in 1893 and the Doves Press in 1900, the latter forming the ‘triple crown’ of private printing along with Morris’s Kelmscott Press and Hornby’s Ashendene Press.  The distinctive Doves type, commissioned in 1899, had been promised by Cobden-Sanderson to his partner Emery Walker for use after his death; following the bitter dissolution of their partnership in 1909, however, he gradually and ‘irretrievably committed [the type] to “the bed of the River Thames”’ between August 1916 and early 1917, in the wish that the type ‘shall never be subjected to a machine other than the human hand’. 

The enigmatic origins of the Pervigilium Veneris have traditionally been dated to the reign of Hadrian and at times attributed to Florus, although its innovative style has led some to place it as late as the fourth century; Walter Pater rather fancifully imagined its composition by a young scholar under Marcus Aurelius.  ‘It is a song in celebration of the spring festival of Venus Genetrix, and is remarkable not only for its exquisite melody and romantic evocation of spring-time and its associations, but also as an experiment in a new form of poetry, making large use of assonance, recurrence of words and phrases, and even occasionally of rhyme, in anticipation of the accentual Latin poetry of a later age’ (Oxford Companion to Classical Literature). 

The opening line and repeated refrain, ‘Cras amet qui nunquam amavit, Quique amavit cras amet’, is here accentuated in red ink, recurring after every four lines of the poem. 

An additional twelve copies were printed on vellum. 

See Tidcombe, p. 64 ff

You may also be interested in...