The Kiltartan History Book. Illustrated with Coloured Plates by Robert Gregory. Dublin: Maunsel, [1909]. First Edition. Pp viii, 52. Publisher’s quarter cloth paper boards, title label to spine. Covers lightly worn, neat library stamp to endpaper, contents in good condition.

Frontispiece illustration and three others plates in colour by Lady Gregory’s son, Robert Gregory (1881-1918). The striking illustrations are drawn from ‘some delft figures, ornaments in a Kiltartan house.’

A chronological history of Ireland mixing myth and fact it was illustrated by her son, Robert, a talented artist who was killed while serving as a pilot during the First World War, an event that inspired Yeats’s poems ‘An Irish Airman Foresees His Death’ and ‘In Memory of Major Robert Gregory’. 

The Kiltartan History Book gets its title form the Barony of Kiltartan in which the author lived at Coole Park and where ‘I have heard a great number of the stories from beggars, pipers, traveling men, and such pleasant company.’