Kipling, Rudyard | The deluxe and definitive edition of Kipling's works

Kipling, Rudyard

The Complete Works in Prose and Verse. Macmillan and company, 1937-1939

35 volumes, 8vo (243 x 160 mm). Titles printed in white within russet frames, printed on handmade paper with a watermark of Ganesha. Original full crimson niger morocco, bound by James Burn, covers with double gilt-fillet border, with raised bands in six compartments, second, fourth, and sixth gilt-lettered, top edges gilt on rough, others uncut, marbled endpapers; spines very lightly sunned, occasional rubbing to extremities.

The Sussex Edition, No. 110 of 525 copies (of which 500 were for sale), Volume I signed by the author

The present volumes constitute the deluxe and definitive edition of Kipling's oeuvre, which he worked on in his final years before his death in 1936. Two volumes of uncollected prose and much verse are collected here for the first time. During the bombing of London in 1941 a substantial portion of the unbound sheets was destroyed; it was later said, in Macmillan’s centenary history, that the visitors’ furniture at the publisher’s office was covered with the Nigerian goatskin leather which could not be used for the destroyed text blocks.

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Richards D23