[LONE OAK PRESS]

FARRER, REGINALD. Mimpish Squinnies: Reginald Farrer’s Short Guide to Worthless Plants. Petersham, Mass.: Lone Oak Press, 2006. Copy I of X special signed copies (a total edition of 40), specially bound in full green morocco, upper cover with a floral design onlaid in gilt, with a separate signed suite with the plates signed and numbered, a bound offprint from Matrix 27 with an account of the printing of the book, and a letter to the purchaser of the book laid-in, the whole in a clamshell case of iridescent hue. 11 x 6 1/4 inches (28 x 16 cm); 28 pp., with 15 full-page multi-block color and hand-colored relief engravings by Abigail Rorer. Fine.

A beautiful and, in its dry way, very funny book. As Rorer's entry on her website reads "Reginald Farrer (1880–1920) was a British plantsman, plant explorer, & prolific writer who was one of the first to promote rock gardening and alpine plants. The text of Mimpish Squinnies consists of fourteen plant descriptions from Farrer’s The English Rock Garden and are of plants that he particularly disliked and described as only he could, with humor, wit, acerbity and anthropomorphism. The title of the book, Mimpish Squinnies, uses two of the many, almost nonsense, words that Farrer employs in some of his descriptions. Accompanying the text are fourteen full-color plant portraits using his descriptions as inspiration along with the structure of the actual plant plus a portrait of Farrer with a short biographical note." The account of the printing of the book from Matrix by Rorer gives one a true appreciation of the vicissitudes of the life of a printmaker!