8vo. Text printed in red and black. Contemporary russet crushed morocco with simple gilt fillet border, spine in 6 gilt-ruled compartments with 7 raised bands, gilt-lettered in one, board edges gilt, page edges gilt with gauffered borders BY COBDEN SANDERSON FOR THE DOVES BINDERY, signed on rear turn-in "19 C-S 12" (light sunning to spine, some light offsetting as usual to endpapers, minor imperfections to boards). Provenance: Haven O'More (1929-2008), book collector (his bookplate, sold, Sotheby's New York, 10 November 1989, lot 266; their description erroneously describing this as a copy on vellum).

THE GARDEN COPY.

LIMITED EDITION, one of 200 copies printed on paper. A Decade of Years comprises a collection of poems selected by Doves Press founder Thomas-James Cobden-Sanderson, who admired their "cosmic" qualities. According to Doves bibliographer Marianne Tidcombe these poems were "selected...to build one great poem, as Wordsworth himself had intended." Cobden-Sanderson himself would say of the collection that the verses were linked together "in one chain of emotion, rising and falling, expanding and contracting, as is the manner of emotion itself." So passionate was Cobden-Sanderson about the content of A Decade of Years that he sent a copy to his friend Bertrand Russell during his six-month imprisonment in 1918 for pacifistic comments he'd published in a weekly newspaper during World War I. Tidcombe DP-25; Tomkinson, p. 56.