772. Not To Be Taken Away

From 14 to 17 May, Firsts: London’s Rare Book Fair was held in London, for which various antiquarian bookshops published colourful catalogues, such as Sims Reed, and Sophie Schneideman, and highlights including a copy of the signed limited edition of The Ballad of Reading Gaol (offered by Peter Harrington) were published on the Firsts website.

Schneideman's catalogue includes among a large group of Eragny Press editions two books that were shown to clients in the Hacon & Ricketts shop, At the Sign of the Dial. Usually, these copies of Vale and Eragny Press books have the prospectus pasted in at the front. To prevent these file copies, which had likely been handled by many people, from being sold, an instruction was written in ink on the front cover:

File Copy
Not to be taken away

File copies of Eragny Press books:
Gustave Flaubert, Un Coeur simple and
La Légende de St. Julien l'Hospitalier (both 1900)

These two Eragny volumes contained stories by Gustave Flaubert: Un Coeur simple and La Légende de St. Julien l'Hospitalier (both 1900). The third Flaubert volume issued by the Eragny Press, Hérodias (1901), not a file copy like the other two, was equally available for purchase at the fair. 

These handwritten notes on Vale and Eragny Press copies were added in various hands over a number of years as office boys came and went. After the press was closed down in 1903, these copies initially remained in the possession of Charles Ricketts, who in due course gave several of them away to friends, such as Gordon Bottomley. These two ended up in the collection of his Italian friend Antonio Cippico, to whom he would later dedicate his 'Victorian masterpiece' Beyond the Threshold.