Sidgwick, F[rank]., ed. — Everyman: A Morality Play

London, Horace Hart, Printer to the University, for A.H. Bullen, 1902. Handmade Paper Edition. Hardcover. Size: 8vo 8" - 9" tall. The only copy such available to the trade currently, being a sturdy, attractive copy of the Handmade Paper Edition, flexible hardcover wraps, and then with stiff laminated paper wraps thereover, with a simple design flourish at front cover. Printed partly because of the recent stage production of the play by the Elizabethan Society. Previous owner's inscription with a flourish, in pen, at first free endpaper, dated March 8th, 1907 but otherwise illegible. Else clean and unmarked of interior, though slightly foxed at end. Light cracking to front joints top and bottom and slight edge-wear to the wraps. Appears to be a practice run, a dry run of sorts, but was based on the full and complete copy of the translation of the Dutch edition extant once in "Mr. Huth's Library," says Sidgwick. An edition published in 1911 by the Medici Society featured 10 mounted leaves of plates in color by John H. Amschewitz, a limited edition of 500 copies, printed on fine, handmade Riccardi paper. Frank Sidgwick provides an Introduction and several notes regarding history of the play, linguistic clues as to origins, and comparisons between different traditions in which the morality play functions, in Low German, Latin and Dutch languages. Born on 7 July 1879, Frank Sidgwick was "an English publisher, writer, scholar and literary editor known by [S]herlockians for his 1902 article about Sherlock Holmes titled 'The Hound of the Baskervilles" at Fault (An Open Letter to Dr. Watson), a long time before the beginning of the Sherlockian' (from the Arthur Conan Doyle Encyclopedia)." The encyclopedia notes the fact that he'd not achieved first-rate honors in school, though he won "the Chancellor’s Medal for English Verse in 1900" before apprenticing for the publisher here, A.H. Bullen, and who also contributed substantially to the Dictionary of National Biography. Sidgwick died in Kent on 15 August 1939 (Encyclopedia). 47 pp.Member, I.O.B.A., C.B.A., and adherent to the highest ethical standards. . . . Near Fine