BY T. S. ELIOT

The edition is no longer available to the public. However, collectors are invited to inquire.

Written in the aftermath of the First World War, The Hollow Men deals with the “lost, violent souls” of modernity. An intransigence and hopelessness pervade the poem. It reads as a portrait of depression — individual depression and an elegy for a depressed society. “Shade without colour” mingles around “gesture without motion,” while,

Between the conception

And the creation

Between the emotion

And the response

Falls the Shadow

Life is very long

Life is very long indeed, for the hollow men in Eliot’s bleak landscape. Whatever the poet’s intentions, his poem is as relatable today as when it was published in 1925. Its words are timeless, and if they do not prescribe a cure to modernity’s hollowness, they are certainly an apt diagnosis.

Artist Notes

T. S. Eliot is likely the most important poet of the twentieth century. His work may represent the clearest “wall” between modern and pre-modern poetry, and his poem, The Hollow Men, is among the strongest bricks. Despite his reputation being built on only a small handful of poems, he won the Nobel Prize in Literature “for his outstanding, pioneer contribution to present-day poetry.”

Edition Notes

• The edition is limited to 127 hardbound copies which are offered in two states.

• The third imprint of No Reply Press, June 2019.

• Book measures 5 ¾ by 8 ¾ inches.

• Typeset in Perpetua, designed by Eric Gill.

Hardbound

• Limited to 111 copies, numbered 17 through 127. As this was the earliest No Reply production, however, several were lost along the way, so the true number is twenty-or-so fewer.

• Printed by hand on heavy vellum-finished stock using a manually-inked proof press.

• Hand-bound in grey felt-finished paper, manufactured in 1965 – the year of Eliot’s death.
  

De Luxe

• Limited to 16 copies, numbered 1 through 16.

• Printed by hand on heavy vellum-finished stock using a manually-inked proof press.

• Hand-bound in handmade French marbled paper.

• Housed in a cloth-lined slipcase.