The Secret Rose. London Lawrence & Bullen 1897. Pp, (11), 265. First Edition, First Issue (with Lawrence & Bullen printed). Publisher’s blue cloth boards with full gilt cover design by Althea Gyles. Previous owner’s bookplate to front paste down, some scattered foxing to title page. A particularly attractive copy. (Wade 21).

A volume of symbolic and visionary tales, a product of Yeats’s profound interest in the occult. It is dedicated to George Russell (AE), who had encouraged Yeats to pursue his experiments with magic and symbolism, when the latter had been a student at the Metropolitan School of Art in Dublin.

Yeats wrote: ‘The mystical life is the centre of all that I do and all that I think and all that I write.’