Troilus and Criseyde

1932

Special Collections PR1895 KN53 1932

New York: Literary Guild; Random House

Number 50 of The Golden Cockerel Press publications was Chaucer’s Troilus and Crisyede, completed on 22 July 1927 and limited to 225 copies; six on vellum. It was the first major work that demonstrated Gill’s outstanding collaboration with Gibbings. Gill produced some of the engravings while at Capel-y-Ffin, a place of respite ‘untouched by men of business’; some sixty others were produced while at Salies-de-Béarn in the Pyrenees. Gibbings paid Gill £100, and pressed his friend: ‘for that you make the book as sumptuous as you can.’ In 1932 Random House in New York, the sole distributor of Cockerel books in America, produced their own imprint edition with the engravings slightly reduced in size from the original.