[SHAKESPEARE, WILLIAM]. A Midsummer-Night's Dream. With Illustrations by Arthur Rackham. London: William Heinemann, 1908.
FIRST TRADE EDITION. Leather-bound; hardcover; quarto (25 x 18 x 4 cm.); pp. [6], 134 + [40] leaves of plates. English text, with illustrations by Arthur Rackham. Beautifully bound in full blue crushed morocco gilt by Bayntun-Riviere; all page edges gilt; marbled endpapers; half-title; vignette title-page printed in black and brown; 40 tipped-in full-page colour plates mounted on heavy off-white paper with grey background and frame, each with a captioned tissue guard; 30 line drawings in the text. The original cloth covers bound in at the rear. Printed at the Ballantyne Press in London. Condition: FINE. A wonderful, tight and clean copy; without previous ownership markings. Exquisite.
Notes: The first trade edition illustrated by Arthur Rackham presented in a sumptuous signed binding. In these remarkable illustrations, Rackham "developed his gift for drawing witches, gnomes, fairies, and anthropomorphized trees and brought them to a pitch of vivid characterization, sometimes with an unsettling frisson of horror" (ODNB). Latimore & Haskell, p. 32; Riall, p.87.
