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GOLDEN COCKEREL PRESS CHAUCER (GEOFFREY) Troilus and Crisdye, NUMBER 30 OF 225 COPIES on paper, 1927
Sold for £8,320 inc. premium
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GOLDEN COCKEREL PRESS
Footnotes
"ONE OF THE MOST IMPORTANT PRODUCTIONS OF ITS KIND"
Troilus and Criseyde stands as the first of three landmark Golden Cockerel Press editions produced through the collaboration of Robert Gibbings and Eric Gill. The prospectus for this work invited a public to anticipate "one of the most important productions of its kind since the days of the Kelmscott press".
The Middle English text, edited by Arundell del Re, features Gill's masterful woodcuts, including two portraits of Chaucer (one with Cupid whispering in his ear, another showing him writing Troilus) along with four full-page illustrations and distinctive page borders that reimagine medieval manuscript traditions through a creative interplay of text and image.
While Gill's whimsical illustrated borders sparked some controversy for their provocative nature, they were later successfully repurposed in the Golden Cockerel Canterbury Tales. The book's combination of superior materials, typography, illustration, and printing skill has made it one of the most valuable and sought-after Golden Cockerel publications, with its worth often matching that of the Press's magnum opus, The Four Gospels, despite the latter's larger print run of 500 copies.

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