YOUNG, Ella. The Rose of Heaven. Poems by Ella Young. Decorated by Maud Gonne.

Dublin: Candle Press, 1920. Quarto. pp. 55. Original grey papered boards, title and rose in blue on upper cover. Copy number 159 of a limited edition of 350 copies only on handmade paper. Top edge uncut, the remainder deckled. Mild fading to cover. A very good copy. An extremely rare Candle Press item.

De Búrca 26.
Ella Young (1865-1951), poet and children’s author was born in Antrim to a staunch Presbyterian family. She took her degree in Political Science and Law in Dublin. She joined the Hermetical Society, founded by AE, who once called her ‘a druidess reincarnated’. A staunch Republican, she was involved in gun-running during the period of the 1916 Rising. Ella is best known as a writer of children’s stories based on Celtic myth and legend. This work is handsomely illustrated by the legendary Maud Gonne.
Limited to 350 copies, this handsome Candle Press quarto unites Ella Young’s mystical, Celtic-revival verse with a suite of decorations by Maud Gonne, borders, vignettes and emblematic roses that give the book its distinctive, ceremonial air. Issued in 1920, during the turbulence of the War of Independence, it is one of the most attractive productions of the early Candle Press, the Dublin imprint founded by the typographer and printer Colm Ó Lochlainn in 1916; within a few years the firm would evolve into the better-known Three Candles Press. For collectors it offers a concentrated collaboration between two emblematic figures, poet-mystic and nationalist icon, and a choice specimen of Ó Lochlainn’s early Dublin printing, from the final phase before the Candle Press name gave way to Three Candles.

[L3 8C]