Jephthah - 1898

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JEPHTHAH

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Title:

Jephthah. A Tragedy.

Upper Cover

Lower Cover

Interior Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Text

Staples - Front of Book

Staples - Rear of Book

Print

Variations:

25 copies printed on machine-made paper.¹

All edges cut.³

Bound with staples in glued on gray wrappers.¹

Upper cover lettered in a black auto-lithograph script ‘Aleister Crowley | “Jephthah” | [rule]’.¹

8 3/8” x 5 1/2”.³

______________________________

One copy rebound by Zaehnsdorf in full blue crushed levant morocco leather for presentation to the dedicatee (Gerald Kelly).⁴

Gilt panels on spine.⁴

Gilt borders and dentelles.⁴

Original wrappers bound in.⁴

8 1/4” x 5 1/2”.⁴

Publisher:

Privately published.

Printer:

The Chiswick Press.¹

Published At:

London.¹

Date:

circa November 1898.

Edition:

1st Edition.

Pages:

ii + 71.³

Price:

Marked as “Not for Sale.”¹

Remarks:

Dedicated to Gerald Kelly.¹

This series of three pamphlets, including “The Poem” and “The Honourable Adulterers” were printed from the paged type of “Jephthah and Other Mysteries,” which was then in the press, and were issued separately as advance editions.²

Pagination:³

Page(s)
[ i]	Title-page
[ ii]	Blank
[ 1]	Fly-title
[ 3]	Dedication
[ 4]	Persons of the play
[5 - 69]	Text
[70 - 71]	Note
[ ]	Blank

Contents:

Author’s

Working

Versions:

1.	Bound holograph manuscript with revisions in the hand of Aleister Crowley. Pages: 367. Dated: 1898. Box 7, Folders 5-6. Harry Ransom Center, Austin, TX.
2.	Printed version with revisions in the hand of Aleister Crowley. Pages: 224. Dated: 1898. Box 7, Folder 7. Harry Ransom Center, Austin, TX.

Other

Known

Editions:

+	Jephthah and Other Mysteries. Lyrical and Dramatic. Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co., London, 1899.
+	The Collected Works of Aleister Crowley, Vol. I, Society for the Propagation of Religious Truth, Boleskine, Foyers, Inverness, 1905.

Bibliographic

Sources:

1.	L. C. R. Duncombe-Jewell, Notes Towards An Outline of A Bibliography of the Writings in Prose and Verse of Aleister Crowley, The Works of Aleister Crowley, Volume III, Appendix A, Gordon Press, New York, 1974, p. 235.
2.	Ibid., p. 233.
3.	Dianne Frances Rivers, A Bibliographic List with Special Reference To the Collection at the University of Texas, Master of Arts Thesis, The University of Texas, Austin, Texas, 1967, p. 10.
4.	Timothy d’Arch Smith, “Aleister Crowley’s Aceldama (1898): The A B Copy”, Book Collector, 56, 2 (Summer 2007), p. 221.

Comments by

Aleister

Crowley:

During the whole summer, the weather got steadily worse and my health took the same course. I found myself obliged to leave the camp and go to London to see doctors. I took rooms in an hotel in London, attended to the necessary medical treatment and spent my time writing poetry. The play Jephthah was my principal work at this period. It shows a certain advance in bigness of conception; and has this notable merit, that I began to realize the possibility of objective treatment of a theme. Previous to this, my lyrics had been more or less successful expressions of the ego; and I had made few attempts to draw characters who were not more than Freudian wish phantasms — I mean by this that they were either projections of myself as I fancied myself or aspired to be; otherwise, images of women that I desired to love. When I say “to Love”, I doubt whether the verb meant anything more than “to find myself through”. But in Jephthah, weak as the play is, I was really taking an interest in other people. The characters are not wholly corrupted by self-portraiture, I suck to the Hebrew legend accurately enough, merely introducing a certain amount of Cabbalistic knowledge.
— The Confessions of Aleister Crowley. New York, NY. Hill and Wang, 1969. Page 165.

______________________________

On my return from Switzerland in 1898, I had nowhere in particular to go. There was no reason why I should settle down in any special place. I simply took a room in the Cecil, at that remote period a first-class hostelry, and busied myself with writing on the one hand and following up the magical clues on the other. Jephthah, and most of the other poems which appear in that volume, were written about this period. It is a kind of backwater in my life. I seem to have been marking time. For this reason, no doubt, I was the more ready to be swept away by the first definite current. It was not long before it caught me.

— The Confessions of Aleister Crowley. New York, NY. Hill and Wang, 1969. Page 172.

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