The Mother's Tragedy.
NP [ London ]: Privately Printed, 1901. First Edition. Hardcover. Octavo. xii + 112pp . Original quarter cloth - white backstrip with blue-grey papered boards. Paper title label on spine. Crowley wrote of that the love lyrics in this collection: "treat love not as an object in itself, but on the contrary, as a dragon ready to devour and one less than St. George.' Poems include 'The Whore in Heaven,' 'The Lesbian Hell,' 'The Summit of the Amorous Mountain,' etc. This First edition was published in an edition of 500 copies in 1901, but it seems highly likely that only a small number of copies were actually bound up, and that the rest of the sheets were used as the basis for the later 'new edition' which Crowley released under his S.P.R.T. - Society for the Propagation of Religious Truth - imprint (the name being a none-too-subtle jest at the expense of the well known Christian publishing house the S.P.C.K. - Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge). Thus this edition is quite scarce. Linen spine a little discoloured and darkened as always, paper title label 98 % complete (unusually so). Boards a little darkened and discoloured, corners bumped and a bit chafed, page edges darkened, endpages unevenly browned. Otherwise a solid, unmarked better than VG copy. Item #39454
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