FLOWER, Robin. The Western Island or The Great Blasket. A CHRISTMAS GIFT FROM ÉAMON DE VALERA

With illustrations by Ida M. Flower. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1945. Second edition. pp. viii, 141, [1]. Light blue cloth, title in gilt on spine. Map of the Great Blaskets on endpapers. Inscribed and signed by Éamon de
Valera to Seán Ó Muimhneacháin, Christmas 1945. A fine copy in frayed dust jacket.
Robin Flower, (1881-1946), was born in Yorkshire, and educated at Leeds Grammar School and Pembroke College, Oxford. He worked from 1929 as Deputy Keeper of Manuscripts in the British Museum and, completing the work of Standish Hayes O’Grady, compiled a catalogue of the Irish manuscripts there. Flower first visited Blasket in 1910, at the recommendation of Carl Marstrander, his teacher at the School of Irish Learning; he acquired there the Irish nickname Bláithín (little flower). He translated Tomás Ó Criomhthain, who was his Irish teacher on Blasket, and wrote a memoir, ‘The Western Island; Or, the Great Blasket’ (1944), illustrated by his wife Ida. After his death his ashes were scattered on the Blasket Islands.