303

William Butler Yeats (1865-1939)

The Tower. Two First Editions.

London: Macmillan and Co., 1928.
First English edition, octavo; 2 pp. of publisher's advertisements at rear; bound in gilt-stamped olive-green cloth, white endpapers, all edges uncut (lacking scarce jacket; offsetting around a portrait of Yeats pasted onto a preliminary blank and at verso of ad leaf at rear; rubbing, lightly bumped, minor surface losses to front free endpaper, ex-libris bookplate and bookseller's label to front pastedown); 7 5/8 x 5 in. 

[Together with] New York: The Macmillan Company, 1938. First American edition, octavo; bound in gilt-stamped green cloth, green endpapers (lacking scarce jacket; faint spots to rear board, extremities bumped, spine a touch darkened, small loss to gilding at spine, endpapers lightly faded); 7 ½ x 5 in. 

Considered by Yeats to be his best book, The Tower contains some of his most famous poems including, "Sailing to Byzantium" and "Leda and the Swan." The bindings are decorated with a gilt illustration of Thoor Ballylee, an Anglo-Norman tower where Yeats summered from 1921 until 1929. The Thoor is referenced in various of his poems and became so well-known for its literary importance that Nobel Laureate Seamus Heaney described it as, "the most important public building in Ireland."

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