EAT CROW

First edition, first printing. An edition of 150 copies, numbered and signed by the author, this copy is no. 8. Although not marked as such, this copy is from the library of Frank Pike, friend of the poet and head of the drama list at Faber and Faber for over 40 years. Set in Bodoni types and printed at Daedalus Press, Stoke Ferry, Norfolk, on Italian handmade paper and bound in full black calf, lettered in gilt to the spine (the gilt faded on this copy) by Zaehnsdorf in London. In the publisher's stiff card slipcase, covered with black cloth and lined with marbled paper (Sagar and Tabor note that some copies were bound up later with the slipcases covered with embossed linen-grain black paper). Upper edge gilt, fore- and lower edges untrimmed. A near fine copy, the binding square and firm, the contents clean throughout. Light rubbing to the spine folds. The slipcase a little rubbed to the spine, with a tiny bump to the bottom of the rear spine edge.

Signed by Ted Hughes to the limitation page at the rear. One of the handful of limited edition volumes published in the wake of, and as appendices to, 'Crow' (Faber, 1970), 'Eat Crow', a short dramatic text, was issued by Hughes' sister Olwyn's Rainbow Press. Noting the long gestation of the 'Crow' poems, Jonathan Bate, in his biography of the poet, reminds us that it was Leonard Baskin (who provides the frontispiece illustration to 'Eat Crow' and the iconic jacket to the Faber collection) who by requesting a poem to accompany "his trademark Crow drawings – a request made just three weeks after Sylvia Plath's death" kick-started the extended series of 'Crow' writings. Bate notes that 'Eat Crow' was the first thing to emerge, in 1964, as part of a verse drama based on Andreae's 'The Chymical Wedding of Christian Rosenkrantz'. (Sagar and Tabor A31).