Eric Gill Song of Songs (facsimile)

To my immense delight, and complete surprise, I was able to buy from e-bay last week a rare facsimile of Eric Gill's 1931 famous illustrated Canticum Canticorum (Song of Songs) - albeit in a German translation (Das Hohe Lied Salomo; but there was delight in that, in the fact that it is Luther's original German translation that was used). I saw for sale somewhere an original copy at c. $12,500; another company is offering the eleven prints separately at £13,500. Mine cost...er...slightly less!... As the original, so this was printed at the Cranach Press in East Germany, and features eleven wood engravings and a whole series of intial capital letters.

For those of you who might want to track down the individual wood-cuts on google, I list them here, using the AV for the English translations:

nigra sum sed formosa [I am black, but comely] - 1:5
inter ubera mea [betwixt my breasts] - 1:13
transiliens colles [skipping upon the hills] - 2:8
qui pascitur inter lilia [he feedeth among the lilies] - 2:16
vadam ad montem [I will get me to the mountain (scil. of myrrh)] - 4:6
hortus conclusus [a garden inclosed] - 4:12
dilecti mei pulsantis [(the voice) of my beloved that knocketh] - 5:2
invenerunt me custodes [the watchmen...found me] - 5:7
ibi dabo tibi [there I will give thee (my loves)] - 7:12 (there is another, earlier, 1925 engraving of this same text)
in domum matris meae [into my mother's house] - 8:2
fuge dilecti mi [Make haste, my beloved] - 8:14

One or two other engravings with English titles from the Song of Songs refer to separate earlier works - e.g. 'Stay me with apples' (re: 2:5), 'On my bed by night' (re: 3:1; both 1925).

For something completely different, you could consult Marc Chagall's Le Cantique des Cantiques (The Song of Songs). The details for that would be a separate exercise!

Of course, this relates to a little forthcoming opusculum: Redeeming Eros. Reading the Song of Songs (Cambridge: Grove Books, 2010)!