GILLESPIE, Ruth Merriam.
The Cup of Gold.
FIRST EDITION, one of 500 copies. San Francisco: Taylor & Taylor, 1917. Illustrated by Anna Wille.
8vo. 18 unnumbered pages, with a mounted color frontispiece by Wille ("And there in all its beauty lay the Dream-Child"), an additional black-and-white plate, and a mounted black-and-white illustration on the front wrapper. Pale green string-tied wrappers, the front cover with mounted illustration set within gilt rules and dark green lettering. A very good copy: short closed tears along the edges of the wrappers and age toning, contents fresh and clean.
Gillespie's brief fairy tale — "a great and beautiful country on the shore of the western ocean which in the ages long ago was inhabited only by the Fairies of the Hills and the Sea" — is set within the careful Taylor & Taylor typography (red ornamental rule borders, ornamental initials, a poppy device on the title page) for which the press is now collected. Anna Wille's signed frontispiece carries the Art Nouveau, Beardsley-adjacent feel of West Coast illustration in the immediate teens.
Provenance: two early ownership bookplates — "From Among the Books of R. I. Johnson" (a turbaned figure beneath a Moorish arch) and "From the Library of Enid Barr Hicks" (a willow-tree vignette) — and, laid in, a 1991 gift inscription from Enid Barr Hicks to Jan Shiosoki, "with love," together with a separate Christmas note: "Merry Christmas Jan! This is one of my Treasures! I want you to have it. Love, Grandmother." A small book with a long social life.
SKU TO-2026-134
