Women in Parliament (Signed Presentation Copy)

ARISTOPHANES (trans. Jack Lindsay; illus. Norman Lindsay). Women in Parliament [Ekklesiazousai]. London: The Fanfrolico Press, 1929.

Large Folio. Half deep-blue Morocco and blue cloth. Illustrated vignette and titling to cover in gilt. Spine lettered in gilt. Upper edge gilt, others uncut. xiv, 60 pp. Etchings by Norman Lindsay throughout. Limited Deluxe Edition. One of 500 copies. Unnumbered presentation copy, signed by Jack Lindsay to the Limitation page. Bookplate of John Raymond Danson to front free endpaper.

The Fanfrolico Press was among the most remarkable ventures in the history of Australian letters — and one of the least likely. Founded in London in 1926 by Jack Lindsay, with financial support from P. R. Stephensen and the backing of his father Norman's reputation, it set out to produce limited editions of classical and Renaissance texts in a style that fused the ideals of the private press movement with the Dionysian sensibility that Norman Lindsay had been embodying in Australian art for two decades. The press took its name from a medieval French term for a jester's ornament and its productions were consistently among the most handsome of their period: typographically distinguished, explicitly erotic in many cases, and designed to shock the respectable reader as much as to delight the cultivated one. It operated until 1930, producing forty-three titles in four years, and its publications are among the most sought-after Australian fine press books of the twentieth century.

Ekklesiazousai — variously translated as Assemblywomen, Women of the Assembly, or Women in Parliament — was written by Aristophanes around 392 BC and is among his later and stranger comedies. Praxagora, a citizen woman of Athens, leads the women of the city in a conspiracy: dressing as men, they infiltrate the assembly before dawn and pass a resolution handing control of the state to the women. Once in power, they institute a radical programme of collective ownership: all private property to be held in common, and an equally radical reorganisation of sexual life, by which the young and beautiful are required to satisfy the old and ugly before satisfying each other. The play is a comedy of inversions, using the fantasy of female governance to examine the pretensions of Athenian democracy and the absurdities of utopian thought with the same irreverence Aristophanes brought to everything. Jack Lindsay's translation retains the play's linguistic energy and its willingness to be vulgar in the service of laughter.

Jack Lindsay (1900–1990), Norman's eldest son, was born in Brisbane and educated in Queensland before joining his father in Sydney and subsequently emigrating to England in 1926 to help found the Fanfrolico Press. He went on to write over 170 books across his long career,becoming one of the most prolific and wide-ranging British writers of his generation. His classical translations, produced in the late 1920s and early 1930s, are among the finest of their period in English.

Norman Lindsay (1879–1969) needs little introduction to Australian readers, and none at all to collectors of Australian art. His etchings for the Fanfrolico Press editions are among the most significant contributions to Australian illustrated book production of the twentieth century. In this edition they provide an accompaniment to Aristophanes' comedy that is, in the best sense of the word, perfectly inappropriate.

The unnumbered presentation copy status places this volume outside the regular limitation sequence — a copy set aside from the edition for distribution at the discretion of the press or its principals, and carrying with it the additional interest of an unknown specific recipient. The signature of Jack Lindsay to the Limitation page is the signature of the translator, printer, and pressman in one.

Very good. Some rubbing to binding edges and a few markings to covers. Contents fine throughout, fresh, bright, and free from markings.

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Catalogue Number: HH000200