Stories of Red Hanrahan.

Dundrum: The Dun Emer Press,, 1904 [1905]. Spades and Diamonds, Courage and Power, Clubs and Hearts, Knowledge and Pleasure First edition, first impression, one of 500 copies, this copy signed and dated by the author on the first blank prior to publication: "W B Yeats, May 10, 1905". These stories constitute an early attempt at independent mythography in the Celtic vein, introducing the wandering mystic "gleeman" Red Hanrahan, who would return periodically in Yeats's later poetry such as "The Tower". The publication features the first drawing by Robert Gregory used by the press, "showing the four aces of a pack of playing-cards spread over the four provinces of Ireland - the four green fields of Irish folklore" (Genet, p. 62), which feature in the stories as cards that Hanrahan bewitches into a pack of hounds. Stories of Red Hanrahan was published by Yeats's sister, Elizabeth Corbet, at the Dun Emer Press, the precursor to the Cuala Press. The title was finished on Lady Day in August 1904 and published on 16 May 1905. The delay was caused by increasing tensions between Yeats's sisters and their colleague Evelyn Gleeson, and the subsequent split on 1 September 1904 of Dun Emer into Dun Emer Guild Ltd under Gleeson and Dun Emer Industries Ltd under the Yeatses. Octavo. Original buff cloth-backed blue boards, blue endpapers, title labels printed in black on spine and front cover, fore and lower edges untrimmed. Text on first and final pages printed in red, woodcut by Robert Gregory. A little wear to spine and lower corner of rear cover, covers and free endpapers toned, faint spots to a few leaves. A very good copy indeed, firm and internally very fresh. Wade 59. Jacqueline Genet & others, eds., The Book in Ireland, 2008; for the Dun Emer split, see William Michael Murphy, Family Secrets: William Butler Yeats and His Relatives, 1994.