Variant Covers of The Secret Rose

Abstract

BECAUSE THE SECRET ROSE (1897) has one of the most famous bindings in a decade of spectacular bindings—dark-blue stamped in gold with an ornate tree design—it is surprising to see variant cloths of red and brown, but both exist. A newly-discovered copy bound in brilliant magenta red in the Holland Library of Washington State University,¹ possesses a cover that does not fit the standard description of Wade 21, and joins two other copies of the book with non-standard covers listed in App. 5 of The Secret Rose, Stories by W. B. Yeats: A Variorum Edition (1992), p. 276 n. 20. These are another magenta copy in the D. W. Weldon Library, the University of Western Ontario,² and a brown copy (with a slight rust cast) in the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, the University of Texas at Austin.³ All three of the variant copies are bound in ribbed cloth.⁴ All bear the date 1897. The publisher’s name on the spines, ‘Lawrence and Bullen’, shows that all were created before the dissolution of this publishing firm in late 1900, which resulted in subsequently bound copies bearing the name ‘A. H. Bullen’ (see Wade pp. 41–42).