Olla. An Anthology of Sixty Years of Song.
London: The OTO, 1946. First Edition. Hardcover. Quarto (11 1/4 x 8 3/4 inches) 128pp. Original brown cloth with gilt lettering down spine and on upper board, which also has a gilt-stamped device: Crowley's 'mark of the Beast' sigil. Frontisportrait of Crowley by Augustus John. Edition limited to 500 copies. "Olla" is Crowley's own selection of his best poetry and the last of his books to be published in his own lifetime. It is arguably the most under-rated of Crowley's works: not only is some of the verse truly magical, but it shows his tremendous versatility, ranging from traditional sonnets and couplets, to the intensely romantic ("La Gitana"); the deeply magical ("An Oath" to Aiwaz), to modernist satire: his "Panacea" described by him as "an International Anthem to Anglo-Saxondom" and which simply consists of the word "Money" printed over and over again. It ends with his stirring "Hymn to Pan", a work which less than a year after the publication of this volume would be read at Crowley's funeral by fellow poet Louis Wilkinson. Coincidentally Crowley had earlier vouchsafed the meaning of the book's title, "Olla", to Wilkinson, indicating that it referred to a line in Catullus's "particularly foul" epigram "Ipsa oler olla legit" in which the word "Olla", which in conventional Latin might have translated as "vase, urn or jar" in that context is clearly used to describe the vagina. On the subject of things sexual, the front cover is adorned with the sigil known as "the mark of the Beast" which includes a front on representation of a penis and two testes, although in this instance a bindery gremlin famously saw the device stamped upside down, somewhat lessening it's effect. Due to war-time economy standards, paper rationing etc., the book did not have the production values or durability of some of Crowley's earlier works and the binders evidently used whatever cloth was to hand: the book is found in several different shades and textures of brown, and less commonly, green cloth. This is one of the brown variants. General shelf wear and rubbing to spine and edges of the boards, cloth somewhat discolored in places, corners bumped. Bookplate on front paste down, a little spotting, mostly to the preliminaries, two of the poems have a little ink underlining. Still, a near-VG copy of a very under-rated book, which due to war-time economy standards, did not have the production values of Crowley's earlier works (lacks dustjacket). Item #34526
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