The Island of Demons: A Verse Play Based on a Canadian Legend

[Toronto]: Harwood Press, 1998. Limited Edition. Hardcover. Fine/No Jacket. Cattell, Ray. 4to - over 9¾ - 12" tall. From an edition of 110 copies, though the number of copies bound and issued may have been much lower. Ten copies were editioned in roman numerals and presumably retained hors commerce; this copy is number IX. Acrylic painted cloth boards. Hand-sewn and bound by John van Huizen. Printed on double-leaves, pagination printed subtly in blind along the inner margins. 72 pp. With 15 illustrations from Cattell (RCA), including three full-page lithograph spreads. Signed by designer Hugh Michaelson. Housed in a hinged-lid box, covered in full dark blue cloth, with black ribbon pull and printed paper label to the lid. Minor chafing to extremities. Box sunned to extremities. The text was set by Linotype in Caslon Old Face by Robert Reid and Mitchell Atlas and printed by Hugh Michaelson on watermarked Lana Verge Antique paper. With letter from Michaelson on his mongrammed stationery. With additional copies of the preface and notes on the author, artist, and genesis of the book by Reid and Cattell, one signed by Michaelson.George Woodcock [1912-1995] was a prolific Canadian writer, playwright, and critic. "The Island of Demons is not an historical play that attempts to render an actual incident or situation from the past. It is a dramatic poem emerging from a Canadian legend. This legend of the Island of Demons appears in at least two fairly divergent forms, and so I have been relieved of the need to believe that either is sheer prosaic fact and have been enabled to proceed from a nucleus of myth to a poetic improvisation. [...] In my play I have not kept to what seems to me the more factually likely version of the legend. I have not been concerned with fact, but with getting as near as possible to imaginative truth, and to present a drama that seemed to me satisfactory in such terms I have taken freely from Thevet, less abundantly from Maguerite of Navarre, and added other elements to complete the whole I had in mind. In the process I have tried to universalize the legend, to deepen the implications that seemed to exist in the story when I first heard it. What those implications are I must leave my poem to state in its own way. But do not seek the Island of Demons on the map or in history; it is, I like to believe, as much nowhere and anywhere as the seacoast of Bohemia." George Woodcock, from the Preface.