Milton,John.

Lycidas.

Paris. Jack Kahane At The Obelisk Press. 1933. This Edition was specially printed by Kahane for private circulation and consisted of but 25 copies, each inscribed (imoprinted. with the name of the recipient. This copy for Hope Richardson. IV, 10 pps. 8vo. Bound in thin cardboard wrappers. Imprinted dustwrapper. Cased in a mildly worn and soiled full Royal Blue Calfskin Chemise.

From: "a history of Jack Kahane and the Obelisk Press By Neil Pearson"

JOHN MILTON

According to Harold Brighouse, Jack Kahane held Milton's lycidas to be the finest poem in the English language. It was first published in 1638 in a book of elegies commemorating the death of Edward King, a contemporary of Milton's at Cambridge who drowned in a shipwreck off the Welsh coast in August 1637. In 1933 Kahane had the poem printed privately, using the Obelisk imprint, in an edition running to just 25 copies. Each copy bears a unique printed dedication: the paper used is handmade Montval; the sheets are sewn, not glued, into the binding; and the volume was issued in a marbled chemise, the title of the poem stamped in gilt on thespine.These werent the usual production values assigned to a book from the Obelisk Press; no other bears the words 'PRINTED UNDER THE DIRECTION OF JACK KAHANE' in the colophon. A meditation on death, sumptuously printed and bound, never offered for sale but instead presented only to a very few close friends, the Obelisk Cycidas seems to have been not so much a book as a memento mon distributed by a man preoccupied by death. This was certainly the opinion of Harold Brighouse, one of Lycidas's dedicatecs: Thoughts of death, if hardly an obsession, were charac-teristic... [Kahane] had been near to death three times before his fatal illness, and besides shell damage on the Western Front he was critically ill. His father, a Rumanian Jew by origin, committed suicide... There was death in the family: In 1933 Kahane seems to have been preoccupied by death — whether as a result of his tuberculosis, his war injuries, thoughts of suicide, or a combination of all three is impossible to say. He continued to live the expensive life of the man about town .Recklessness of living is venial in a man convinced that he has not long to live; noted Brighouse — and was typically blithe on a presentation card he tucked into Caresse Crosby's copy of lycitlas: 'Please accept this little edition of one of the finest pieces of English, done to please myself.Which self was most pleased? The mortally ill Kahane would have been drawn by the poem's tender ruminations on premature death; the Kahane who aspired to be Balzac but had to settle for being Cecil Barr would have responded to Milton's fear, expressed in the poem, of dying before fulfilling one's promise; Kahane the spendthrift philanderer would have been comforted by Milton's faith in redemption.

The individual dedication in each copy of lycidas builds a checklist of those whom Kahane regarded as the important people in his life, at a time when he seems to have thought he was about to leave it. As Well as Brighouse and Crosby, copies of lycidas were dedicated to Sylvia Beach; to Michel Bogouslavski, head of the foreign books department at Hachette and the man who brokered Kahane's split from his partner/printer Marcel Servant in 1937; to Virginia Vernon, writer and wife of Broadway director Frank Vernon; and to Auriol Lee, a theatre actress and director, who appeared in Alfred Hitchcock's 1941 thriller Suspicion. Kahane's connection to Vernon and Lee is unknown, as is the whereabouts of the other nineteen copies. Kahane's wife Marcelle must be one of the missing dedicatees; other likely recipients include Kahane's younger brother Fred, Stuart Gilbert, Nancy Cunard... but until the missing copies surface, best not [let] our frail thoughts dally with false surmise.

Several light spots of foxing to prelim. Gutters lightly soiled. Generally, a Fine, crisp copy in like Dustwrapper and Very Good Chemise. Very Rare.

Item #8728