Satyrs & Sunlight: Silvarum Libri (Limited edition)

McCRAE, Hugh (illus. Norman Lindsay). Satyrs & Sunlight: Silvarum Libri. Printed by John Sands Ltd. and published for the author by John Lane Mullins, Sydney, 1909.

Demy Quarto. Original quarter vellum and grey-blue boards with bevelled edges. Spine and upper board lettered and decorated in gilt. Uncut. [xvi], 149, [iv] pp.; frontispiece portrait of the author; 8 tinted lithograph plates by Norman Lindsay present (see condition note); title page vignette printed in red and black; text illustrations and decorations throughout by Norman Lindsay. List of subscribers and colophon at rear. First edition. Limited to 130 numbered copies, initialled by the author. This copy unnumbered. Incomplete — plates deficient (see condition note).

There is a passage in the Australian Dictionary of Biography describing Hugh McCrae's arrival in the Sydney literary world of the early 1900s as something like the arrival of a foreign element — a poet of classical sensuality, colour, and pagan delight in a literary culture still largely dominated by the bush ballad tradition and its democratic plain-speaking. The poems gathered in Satyrs & Sunlight — written between McCrae's arrival in Sydney in the late 1890s and the book's publication in 1909 — exist in a world of fauns and nymphs, sunlit glades, and Dionysiac excess, rendered in verse of real lyric beauty. They are not poems of Australia as Australia was usually written about; they are poems of an imagined Mediterranean Arcadia transplanted to Australian sunlight, and the transplantation, in McCrae's handling, is entirely convincing. Kenneth Slessor — who named McCrae alongside Norman Lindsay among the foundational influences on his own poetic sensibility — would later declare that poetry in Australia had only begun any consistent growth with the publication of Satyrs & Sunlight. It is a judgement that subsequent literary history has largely endorsed.

The illustrations by Norman Lindsay are central to the book's identity and to its cultural importance. Lindsay and McCrae were kindred spirits in their shared commitment to classical paganism as a living aesthetic ideal, and the plates Lindsay contributed to this volume — hand-tipped in part, several tinted — are among his finest early illustrative work. The book was printed by John Sands and published for the author by John Lane Mullins at Challis House, Sydney, in a limited edition of 130 copies. It preceded by seventeen years the Fanfrolico Press edition of 1928 — published in London by Jack Lindsay, Norman's son, with expanded content and a new introduction by Thomas Earp — and remains the rarer and more historically significant of the two.

Important note regarding completeness: The standard collation for this edition calls for 20 full-page illustration plates within pagination, comprising 3 hand-tipped plates and several tinted lithographs, in addition to the frontispiece portrait. This copy retains 8 tinted lithograph plates by Norman Lindsay together with the frontispiece; the remaining plates — including all 3 hand-tipped plates — are absent, presumably removed at some prior point. The copy is also unnumbered, whereas the full edition of 130 copies was initialled and numbered by the author. Prospective purchasers should be aware that this is an incomplete copy and it is priced accordingly. The text, binding, and surviving plates are otherwise in the condition described below.

Incomplete. Some darkening and markings to vellum spine and cover boards. Contents show some foxing throughout. Surviving tinted lithograph plates by Norman Lindsay clear and bright, very well preserved.

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Catalogue Number: HH000463