Merriman, Bryan
The Midnight Court – Limited Edition
Privately printed for subscribers at The Dolmen Press, Dublin: 1953
The Midnight Court by Brian Merriman is newly translated from the Irish by David Marcus. Michael Biggs designed and cut the Headpiece and Vignettes. The text is handset in Poliphilus Type & Centaur Initials. The Gaelic Title in Petrie Type was lent by the Dublin University Press. Two Hundred Copies on Antique Paper are now printed and bound by hand & finished in April MCMLIII at The Dolmen Press Dublin. This is number 95. Decorative paper covers oven cloth spine with gilt lettering, a lovely copy, with slight rubbing to edges, light bumping to corners and rippling to the spine as seen in photos. Light foxing, mainly to endpapers and first & last pages and very mild to sporadic pages throughout, but overall clean and bright pages. Unpaged. 'Originally written in the Irish language by the 18th-century poet Brian Merriman (circa 1745–1805), The Midnight Court is an extended satiric poem that assesses the growing economic, political, and familial constraints of late 18th-century Catholic Ireland under British colonial rule, while subversively playing on the tradition of the aisling (or vision) poem in which a beautiful woman represents Ireland’s threatened sovereignty. While containing many insights into 18th-century social conditions, The Midnight Court is also an exuberant, even jaunty work of the comic imagination'.
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