Inscribed by Sydney Cockerell in black ink to the front free endpaper: “To Brian S. Cron / from Sydney Cockerell”. Two-sided manuscript letter in black ink addressed to Cockerell from the palaeontologist Arthur Smith Woodward (1864-1944) on British Museum, Natural History Department headed notepaper, dated May 4th 1885, discussing an upcoming exhibition of fossils at the museum, to which Cockerell has donated some specimens. The text of the work is annotated in pencil, possibly in Cockerell’s hand, but more likely Cron’s, with numerous marginal lines scattered throughout and a series of pencil numbers in the margins of the section comprising the letters of the artist and bookbinder Thomas James Cobden-Sanderson. In addition, there is a list of three addresses on the rear endpaper, the first being a residence of Cockerell’s, the second apparently pertaining to Philip Webb, as well as an ink annotation clearly in the hand of Cockerell, correcting a spelling error to a preliminary page charting the key dates in his life.
A compendium of letters written to Sydney Cockerell (1867-1962), the museum curator and collector, director of the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge (1908-1937), and secretary to William Morris’s Kelmscott Press, from his wide circle of artistic and literary friends, including John Ruskin, Octavia Hill, William, Jane, and May Morris, Leo Tolstoy, Philip Webb, Lady Burne-Jones, Emery Walker, Thomas Hardy, and many others.
First edition. Inscribed by Sydney Cockerell. Publisher’s original light-blue cloth with titles in brown to the spine. Bottom edge untrimmed. Illustrated with 16 black and white photographic portrait plates. A very good copy, the binding square and firm with some scattered spotting to the boards and spine, minor wear to the spine ends, and a little bumping to the corners. The contents with a couple of small areas of abrasion to the title page causing slight loss to the wording of the subtitle/editor’s name and with three small dots of related paper adhesion to the frontispiece, as well as the occasional spot of light foxing to page edges, are otherwise in very good order throughout.
