Verses by A.E. Housman, Illustrations by Ann Arnold

11 x 8.5 inches, thirty-two pages
Printed on Mohawk Superfine at Puritan Capital, Hollis, New Hampshire. Color matching and layout by Elvira Piedra.
Published in a softcover edition of 500 copies by Stinehour Editions, 2017.

At peep of day we rise from bed
And feed the fowls: the fowls are fed.

A.E. Housman's poem of thanks for hospitality written into the Wise family guestbook celebrates the insatiable fowls of Woodchester House and comes to life through Ann Arnold's exuberant illustrations. Written in May of 1902, the text originally appeared in an article entitled "The Poet as House-Guest: some unpublished verse of A.E. Housman" by Fraser Bragg Drew in the University of Indiana's Lilly Library exhibition catalogue, A.E. Housman: a collection of manuscripts, letters, proofs, first editions, etc... published in 1961. The present publication contains a brief text by Ian Jackson who has in addition written a scholarly commentary on Housman's verses to accompany the book. It can be obtained directly from the author's website at ianjacksonbooks.com.

Ann Arnold has illustrated five books for children:  Alice Waters’s Fanny at Chez Panisse (HarperCollins, 1992) and the recent sequel, Fanny in France (Viking, 2016), Sara  London’s Firehorse Max    (HarperCollins,   1997),   and two books of her own:   The Adventurous Chef:  Alexis Soyer (Farrar Straus Giroux, 2002) and Sea Cows, Shamans and Scurvy: Alaska’s First Naturalist: Georg Wilhelm Steller (Farrar Straus Giroux, 2008). Forthcoming is her illustrated edition of a little-known poem of thanks for hospitality by A.E. Housman, to be published under the title of the refrain, The Fowls are Fed. Her illustrations for The Adventurous Chef: Alexis Soyer were recently acquired by UCLA.

Prints of a few of her sumi-e drawings are available here.

Ian Jackson (1951 - 2018) was one of the very few erudite humorists and a celebrant of the Valentine, who brought to all of his works the expression of a brilliant intellect with delightful anecdote. He published a volume of Valentines with Footnotes, accounts of the distinctive language of the romance philologist Yakov Malkiel (Teach Yourself Malkielese, 2006) and the physicist John David Jackson (Mathein Pathein, 2016), and numerous obituaries and articles in Belfagor, Conférence, Taxon, Petits Propos Culinaires, The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, and The Book Collector. His pioneering account of The Price-Codes of the Book-Trade (2010) was published in a revised and enlarged edition in 2017. He lived in Berkeley, California, in a home depicted in The House of 70,000 Books by Roderick Stinehour, also available from the Shop. Visit the author's website.