A Mad Lady's Garland. WITH The Plain Facts by a Plain but Amiable Cat (Garland Chapbook)

London: The Cresset Press / Garland Chapbook, 1936. ~Red-brown cloth, gilt lettering on black to front board and spine. Corners very slightly pushed in. With original cream dustwrapper, black lettering printed on laid paper, review by George William Russell ('AE') to rear cover. Dustwrapper edgeworn with small loss but protected in removable glassene wrapper. Bottom and fore-edges deckled. Minor offset browning to endpages. A very little scattered foxing. Attractive woodcut bookplate of the George Borrow scholar and bibliographer Ann Ridler (country scene with cats) to inside front board. Ann Ridler wrote various pieces on Pitter, including her biography for the ODNB. Although unsigned, on stylistic grounds this bookplate may be tentatively attributed to Joan Hassall, who worked with Ruth Pitter on the enclosed 'Garland Chapbook'. Signature of Ruth Pitter to half title. With two loose enclosures, both with poems by Ruth Pitter: a 1989 Christmas card from Enitharmon Press (poem by Pitter inside), and a small (6.8 x 7.4cm) chapbook, in an envelope with handwritten bibliographic information. Chapbook is 'The Plain Facts by a Plain but Amiable Cat' (Garland Chapbook No. 1), 8pp, (inc covers), with four-colour illustration of amiable cat in baroque frame to cover and poem by Pitter within. Decorative borders to inside pages. Pamphlet stitch binding, with lower stitch slightly loose (likely production error). Rear chapbook cover has initials of contributors in red: R. P. (Ruth Pitter), J. H. (Joan Hassall), J. F. (Joy Foster), and R. B. (H. Raymond Barnett), with imprint 'Printed at 88 Kensington Park Road, London W.11' (Hassall's house, where she had her own 1832 Albion hand press). Envelope dates chapbook to 1948 and has 'cut on metal & hand printed by J. H. in her private press'. This chapbook was printed in a limited edition of 300 copies. Joan Hassall (1906-1988) was one of the major wood engravers and illustrators of twentieth-century Britain, awarded an OBE in 1987. Much like Pitter, she established herself on the national stage in the 1930s, and went on to produce 'the most delicate wood-engravings produced since the days of Thomas Bewick' (McLean, 1960, p. 9) for a wide range of works, including Ruth Pitter's 1950 Urania. Ruth Pitter (1897-1992), poet and craftswoman. First discovered by Hilaire Belloc, who financed her earliest publications, was 'among the most important influences in her life' (ODNB), and provides a preface to A Mad Lady's Garland, she 'first attracted public attention' with this volume, first published in 1934: 'a brilliantly crafted work reflecting her early exercises (...) in the art of pastiche' (ODNB). Inspired by the writing of her friend C.S. Lewis, Pitter was to join the Anglican church during the Second World War, and her later writing 'celebrated a belief in an all-pervading divinity in creation' (ODNB). Pitter supported herself by running a business making decorative furniture with the artist Kathleen O'Hara, with whom she lived until the latter's death in 1973. In 1955, she became the first woman to receive the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry; in 1979, she was appointed CBE. In her obituary of Pitter, Ann Margaret Ridler writes that '[h]er whole life was devoted to her craft, her writing grounded in the natural world, in common things and people portrayed with love and a painterly clarity - sometimes too with a grotesque even rough humour, yet penetrating far deeper' (Ridler, 'Capturing the Dance in Stillness', The Guardian 3 Mar. 1992). This is a signed first edition, second impression of Pitter's first significant work, provenance including Ann Ridler, who certainly met Pitter and wrote sensitively on her life and work, with charming limited edition chapbook by Pitter and Joan Hassall. ~Robust packaging. All UK orders trackable, others on request.. 2nd impress. Hardback. Very Good/Good. viii, 75pp. With dustwrapper. Binding tight, text unmarked.