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Contemporary private presses are fairly numerous. The two which produce what are, from a literary point of view at any rate, the most interesting books are the Hogarth Press and the Ovid Press. From the Ovid Press Mr. John Rodker has just issued a very handsome edition of the poems of Mr. T. S. Eliot. Poems by Mr. Eliot have also been published by the Hogarth Press, together with works in verse and prose by Virginia and Leonard Woolf, Katherine Mansfield, and J. Middleton Murry.
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Our French allies seem to be making a serious effort to break with that tradition of bad printing which has for so long oppressed their literature. Several new publishing houses have come into existence with the avowed purpose of producing books that shall be handsome objects in themselves. The directors of the Nouvelle Revue Française have set a higher standard in their publications than most of their rivals. But even in their editions the most horrible atrocities, such as the omission of a whole sheet of sixteen pages in the middle of a book, occasionally happen. But the books produced by La Sirène, by La Belle Edition, and the Société Littéraire de France are worthy of all praise.
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The selection of rare and valuable books from the Arbury Hall Library which, as announced in the January number of The London Mercury, was to have been offered for sale by auction at Sotheby's on behalf of the owner, Sir Francis Newdigate-Newdegate, K.C.M.G., has instead been sold privately. Neither the name of the purchaser nor the destination of the books has yet been made public. Since the collection contains editions of Elizabethan books of the utmost rarity, and indeed some that are apparently unique, it is to be hoped that it will not pass beyond the reach of students of literature.
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Collectors of Swinburniana will be interested in A Catalogue of the Works of Algernon Charles Swinburne in the Library of Mr. Edmund Gosse, London, privately printed at the Chiswick Press, 1919. Only fifty copies of this catalogue have been issued, of which a few can still be obtained from Mr. James Bain, bookseller, 14 King William Street, Strand.
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Many items of the greatest rarity are included in Mr. Gosse's collection. Among them we would note one of the fifteen copies of The Devil's Due (1875), preserved by accident when the issue was destroyed; Laus Veneris, Moxon, 1866, one of a few trial copies issued before the poem was included in Poems and Ballads; the essay on William Blake, Hotten, 1868, with the original title-page, afterwards cancelled, ornamented by the vignette of Zamiel from the Book of Job; The Jubilee, The Question, Gathered Songs, all three published by Ottley in 1887, in editions of only twenty-five copies each. Among the Swinburne MSS. in the possession of Mr. Gosse are the holograph of Pan and Thalassia, and the holograph of the first draft of Anactoria.