WILDE, Oscar. The Ballad of Reading Gaol with an Introduction by Burton Rascoe and Lithographs by Zhenya Gay.

New York: The Heritage Press, New York, [1937]. Imperial octavo. pp. xii, [2], 42, [1]. Decorative embossed sheepskin binding resembling gaol cell, lettered in gilt along spine. All edges red. A fine copy in fine slipcase.
Before he fled to Paris, Oscar Wilde had spent some time in Reading Gaol not far from Oxford. There, in that gaol, a man who bore the number C3 was hanged for having murdered a woman. There, in Reading Gaol, Oscar Wilde was driven to distraction by the sight of C3 preparing, and being prepared, to die. Out of his distraction, Wilde produced a poem which has become one of the classics, one of the most famous of the master pieces of English literature.
It is a poem written in monotone upon that theme which caused Victor Hugo to write his ponderous novels: man’s inhumanity to man. “We always kill the thing we love,” wrote Oscar Wilde, “the coward does it with a kiss, the brave man with a sword.” He ranted against the world’s injustice, he raved about the poor condemned man looking wistfully at the sky, he tore his hair when dawn and the hanging came and he watched the damned grotesques make arabesques upon the prison floor. But he did all this in a long poem full of lyric beauty.

[L4 8B]