ANIMULA

Signed and numbered limited large-paper edition printed on English hand-made paper (issued nineteen days after the first trade edition). Printed at the Curwen Press. One of 400 copies, this being no. 142. Original yellow paper-covered boards lettered in brown to the front panel. Lower and fore-edges untrimmed. A better than very good copy, the binding square and firm, the contents clean throughout. The yellow boards are a little soiled, the spine tips a touch rubbed.

Limited edition of 400 copies of which this example is hand-bumbered 142 and signed by T. S. Eliot in black ink to the limitation page. 'Animula', no. 23 in the series of Ariel Poems issued by Faber and Faber, is the third of Eliot's six contributions to the series. The title, 'Animula', can be translated as 'little soul', or the 'simple soul' of the poem's first line (a quotation from Dante's Purgatorio XVI). Like many of the Ariel poems, 'Animula' alludes to Christmas, but the poem is woven from a rich web of allusions, from the Emperor Hadrian via Byron and Walter Pater, to the mysteries of the Eucharist. The poem is illustrated with two wood engravings by the English artist, Gertrude Hermes (1901-83), the second in colour. This colour image, of a juggling, naked Hermes (with distinctly rendered genitalia) was apparently responsible for copies of the book being seized by US Customs officers in 1932. (Gallup A14b).