[Eric Gill Presswork / Alfonso Ossorio’s Copy] Poems (1931).

Item Details

GRAY, John. Poems (1931). London: Sheed and Ward, 1931.

Printed by René Hague and Eric Gill at Pigotts, near Hughenden, Buckinghamshire. One of 200 copies.

12mo. Original printed wrappers, publisher’s glassine (light edge wear). Title page and colophon with Gill-style woodcut printer’s device depicting a wolf beneath a stylized tree, a recurrent Gill motif (cf. the Four Gospels and Hague’s early Pigotts imprints). Light toning to endpapers, a fine, crisp copy overall.

Provenance: with the striking art-deco unicorn bookplate of Alfonso Ossorio (1916–1990), the Filipino-American painter and collector associated with Jean Dubuffet and Jackson Pollock, mounted to the front pastedown; Ossorio’s signature on the facing leaf, dated MCMXXXVII (1937). An exceptional association copy linking the Symbolist-Catholic aesthetic of Gray—Oscar Wilde’s friend and possible model for Dorian Gray—to the mid-century Surrealist-Expressionist circle through Ossorio’s library.

Printed by René Hague and Eric Gill at their private press at Pigotts, this small volume of devotional and nature-inflected verse by the late-Victorian poet and priest John Gray represents one of the earliest Sheed & Ward collaborations with Gill’s presswork. Only 200 copies were issued.

The Ossorio bookplate—showing a stylized unicorn radiating light, within a geometric frame signed Ex Libris Alfonso Ossorio—is itself a work of art, likely commissioned in the 1930s during his early London or Harvard years and stylistically akin to his later graphic abstractions.

References: Gill & Hague printing listed in Evan Gill, Bibliography of Eric Gill (1953), p. 56; Sheed & Ward imprints cat. no. 167.

Condition: Near fine in original wrappers with glassine preserved.