If, a limited and numbered letterpress broadside of Kipling's iconic poem.
Whittington, Gloucestershire, England: Nomad letterpress, circa 2011. Limited and numbered broadside. Broadside. This limited and numbered letterpress broadside of Kipling’s iconic poem is number “27” of 94. It was printed circa 2011 by Nomad letterpress, operating out of the historic Whittington Press near Cheltenham, Gloucestershire, using Cason and wood types on Zerkell mould-made paper. Copy number 45 of this edition is held in the permanent collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum, where it is preserved under accession number E.797-2014.
The print measures 51 x 38 cm. It is mounted on heavy white card within a recessed beveled cut border, the mount measuring 65.5 x 51.5 cm, with 7 cm top and side margins and an 8mm lower margin. We presume that it was issued thus; this unblemished copy remains within the original plastic wrapping, as originally sold by Henry Sotheran Limited, with their original invoice attached to the verso.
Please note that we chose to leave this plastic cover in place when photographing the item, in the interest of preserving condition. This item will be packed flat with our customary care and posted at cost, depending on the buyer’s shipping preference.
“IF-” was first published in October 1910 in Rewards and Fairies, Kipling’s collection of eleven stories and twenty-three poems that was a continuation of the Puck stories first told in 1906’s Puck of Pook’s Hill. To capitalize on the “immediate and immense popularity” of “IF-”, the publisher of the American edition of Rewards and Fairies, Doubleday, Page & Company, swiftly followed with a separate publication in 1910. A British edition followed in 1914, published the first month of the First World War.
Although the poem was not collected and published until 1910, inspiration for the poem occurred 15 years earlier, in the person of Leander Starr Jameson (1853-1917), leader of the failed Jameson Raid of that year against the Boer Republic of Transvaal that helped precipitate the Second Anglo-Boer War. “Despite the fiasco, much of the British public treated Jameson as a dashing hero… Kipling admired him greatly, and in his autobiography, Something of Myself, Kipling said that "If—" was drawn from Jameson's character.” The character flaws of the poem’s muse are an irony.
The poem’s association with the collective, anonymized slaughter of the First World War is another irony. This was no accident. Indeed, a 1916 edition of the poem “was produced in an edition of 30,000 as ‘a Xmas and New Year card’ from the Ladies’ Buffet staff to the soldiers embarking for the front through Waterloo Station; Kipling waived his royalty, cutting the reprint cost”. The poem’s enshrinement of firmness of character and temperament in the face of adversity became inextricably linked to the patriotic offering and sacrifice of so many British sons to the decidedly inglorious trenches of the First World War.
The association was undoubtedly difficult for Kipling, who lost his own and only son to the war. “John Kipling, who had been commissioned in the Irish Guards at the outset of the war, had gone to France in August 1915; in September, a month after his eighteenth birthday, he was reported wounded and missing in the battle of Loos. His body was never found in Kipling's lifetime: the grave was identified in 1992. John's death coincided with the onset of Kipling's suffering from the undiagnosed duodenal ulcer that tormented the last twenty years of his life and that at last killed him.”
None of the ironies attendant to the poem’s inspiration and application diminish its beautifully lyrical and enduringly compelling exhortations.
References: Victoria & Albert Museum; Richards A269; ODNB. Item #009009
Price: $500.00