The most treasured book of these earlier years is the Garland of Rachel (1881), which consists of poems offered to Miss Rachel Daniel on her first birthday by, among others, Andrew Lang, Austen Dobson, Robert Bridges, John Addington Symonds, Edmund Gosse, W. E. Henley, T. Humphry Ward, and Margaret L. Woods. Only thirty-six copies were printed, one of which is priced in Mr. Chaundy's catalogue at £40.
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In 1882 the old press was replaced by a much more scientific machine, and among the first books to be printed on the new press was Prometheus the Firegiver (1883), by Robert Bridges. A number of the Poet Laureate's poems were to be issued from the Daniel Press. Of the Poems of 1884 one hundred and fifty copies were printed (£3 10s. in Mr. Chaundy's catalogue). The Feast of Bacchus (one hundred and five copies) and The Growth of Love, published anonymously in an edition of only twenty-two copies, appeared in 1889. The year 1903 witnessed the publication of two more pieces from Mr. Bridges' pen, namely, Now in Wintry Delights and Peace, an Ode written on Conclusion of the Three Years' War.
In 1884 Dr. Daniel made use for the first time of a number of fine seventeenth-century woodcut ornaments. His printer's mark was a piece of contemporary work, designed by Alfred Parsons, representing Daniel in the lions' den, with the motto, Misit Angelum Suum.
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Noteworthy volumes which issued from the Daniel Press in the nineties were Our Memories, Shades of Old Oxford (1893), a collection of Oxford reminiscences by various hands; The Child in the House (1894), by Walter Pater, published only a month or two before his death; Poems of Laurence Binyon (1895); Keble's Easter Day, of which only twelve copies were printed by Miss Rachel Daniel (1897). Eight years before Miss Daniel had printed The Lamb, by W. Blake, in duodecimo (1889).
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Besides those already mentioned, Dr. Daniel issued a number of reprints of old books. Sixe Idillia, translated from Theocritus by E. D. (possibly Dyer), was reprinted from the unique copy (1588) in the Bodleian Library. Love's Graduate, a comedy, by John Webster, being Mr. Gosse's distillation of what was Websterian in the Webster-Rowley comedy of 1661, appeared in 1885. The Muses Garden of Delights, a reprint of a unique Elizabethan volume, edited with an introduction by William Barclay Squire, was printed by Dr. Daniel in 1901. Another edition, printed by the Clarendon Press, was published in the same year.
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We have mentioned only a few of the Daniel books. A complete bibliography of the publications of the Press during its first thirty years of activity may be found in an article by Mr. Madan, at that time Sub-Librarian of the Bodleian, contributed to the Times Literary Supplement of February 20th, 1903. As we have already had occasion to mention in these columns, the Daniel Press is now in the Bodleian, together with specimens of the books produced on it.