A Seven Acres’ Night’s Dream
Inscribed by Charlotte Shaw
HABERLY, Loyd.
Daneway: A Fairy Play for Emery Walker F. S. A. … [(Limitation:) Long Crendon,] Seven Acres Press, 1929.
Large 8vo in 4s, pp. [4 (blank)], [viii], 8, [2], 9-18, [2], 19-40, [2], 41-45, [2], [7 (blank)]; title printed in red, green, and gold, large woodcut decorations printed in black, accompanied by lettering in red, green, and gold, numbered by hand, final blank signed ‘Loyd Haberly | 15 August ’29’; bound in tawed pigskin by Haberly, boards tooled in gilt and ruled in blind, spine gilt in compartments and lettered directly in gilt, top- and fore-edges gilt, tail-edge uncut; a little rubbed with a few small marks, but a very good copy; front flyleaf inscribed ‘Barry | from | Charlotte F. Shaw. || A commemoration of | The first Malvern Festival. || 1929'.
First and only edition, numbered fourteen of sixty copies, of a play written, printed, and bound by Loyd Haberly, dedicated to Emery Walker and set at his home, this copy inscribed to Sir Barry Jackson by Haberly’s friend and patron Charlotte Shaw on the occasion of the first Malvern Festival.
Both poet and printer, the American Loyd Haberly (1896–1981) took up fine printing while studying at Oxford on a Rhodes Scholarship, establishing his own Seven Acres Press at Long Crendon in Buckinghamshire in 1925; in 1933 he was appointed to run the Gregynog Press, on the recommendation of John Johnson, before returning to the US. His lighthearted Daneway recasts Oberon as ‘Fairy King of Gloucestershire’ and Titania as ‘his Queen, daughter and heiress to Dorex, King of Oxfordshire’ and sets the scene on the lawn at Daneway House, the home of his friend and fellow printer Emery Walker, depicted in a woodcut roundel drawn by Haberly while visiting.
With an all-encompassing approach to craft which even saw him trimming the stone for the Seven Acres’ building by hand, Haberly is here responsible not only for writing the text and for printing it but also for the woodcut illustrations and the binding; much of the coloured lettering and all of the gold lettering was applied by hand after printing, albeit using hand-letters designed not by Haberly but by Walker.
The present copy is inscribed by the activist, philanthropist, and translator Charlotte Frances Shaw (née Payne-Townshend, 1857–1943) as ‘a commemoration of the first Malvern Festival’; the Festival was co-founded by the recipient, the theatre director Sir Barry Jackson (1879–1961), and Shaw’s husband, George Bernard Shaw. Both Bernard and particularly Charlotte Shaw were friends and patrons of Haberly, both at Seven Acres and later at Gregynog, Mrs Shaw commissioning a copy of Daneway to be bound for ‘her strange friend Lawrence of Arabia’ (American Bookbuilder, p. 36). Yet another copy was ordered by Walker’s friend, then-Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald, which – Haberly later suggested – prompted Walker’s knighthood in 1930.
See Haberly, An American Bookbuilder in England and Wales: Reminiscences of the Seven Acres and Gregynog Presses (1979).