James Stephens The Crock of Gold, Thomas Mackenzie Color Plates, 1956

The Piece

James Stephens, The Crock of Gold, published by The Macmillan Company, New York, 1956, with eight color plates and decorative headings and tailpieces by Thomas Mackenzie. Green cloth over boards with a gilt lozenge stamped on the front: a leprechaun seated among flowers and grasses, hammering at a shoe. The spine is plain. The copyright page carries the 1912 Macmillan copyright, a 1940 renewal in Stephens's own name, and the line Twenty-Third Printing, 1956.

The book is laid out in six parts: The Coming of Pan, The Philosopher's Journey, The Two Gods, The Philosopher's Return, The Policemen, and The Thin Woman's Journey and the Happy March. Page numbers run in brackets at the foot, a small typographic habit of this setting.

Mackenzie's color plates are the reason to own it. The frontispiece shows the two Philosophers at their table, pipes lit, enormous shadows thrown up the wall behind them, an orange cat yowling at their feet. Later plates include a red-haired woman kneeling on a mountainside before a figure standing waist-deep in greenery, and a group seated on a hillside in a landscape of yellow and green hills, a boy in a red cap standing over them with a red cloth spread on the ground. The color is soft, flat and strange, somewhere between watercolor and Japanese print.

Between the plates run his black and white decorations, cut like wood engravings: a crow lifting out of a wind-bent tree over a row of small flowers, a woman walking a goat along a hillside at night. They head and tail the chapters throughout.

The story itself is the one that made Stephens's name. A Philosopher living in a pine wood, a crock of gold stolen from the Leprecauns of Gort na Cloca Mora, two policemen, the Thin Woman of Inis Magrath, and the god Pan arriving in the Irish countryside to cause trouble, with Angus Og eventually arriving to settle it.

History & Provenance

This copy has three layers of history written into it, and they stack neatly.

On the rear pastedown is the label of Levinson's, The Book Store, Sacramento, printed in black with a winged figure carrying an armload of books. Levinson's was a real Sacramento fixture. The Sacramento Bee reported on a burglary there in October 1944, and the shop was still turning up in the Sacramento Union into the mid 1960s, which brackets the period this copy would have been sold.

On the front free endpaper, in blue ink, is a Christmas inscription dated 1960: Yours, for hours of pleasurable diversion, with Waking hours added as an aside, signed lovingly, from Amy and Eileen. On the facing leaf, in a different and much more formal hand, the owner's name: Pat Maschek. Two women gave a Sacramento bookshop copy of an Irish fantasy to a third for Christmas in 1960, and she put her name in it.

James Stephens was born in Dublin in February 1880, though he liked to claim 1882 and the same birthday as Joyce. He was discovered by AE, George Russell, in 1907, published his first poems in 1909, and co-founded The Irish Review in 1911 with Thomas MacDonagh and Padraic Colum. The Crock of Gold appeared in 1912 and won the Polignac Prize the following year. He later became a close friend of Joyce, who at one point proposed that Stephens help him finish Finnegans Wake. He spent his last decade broadcasting for the BBC and died on St Stephen's Day, 26 December 1950.

Thomas Mackenzie, born in Bradford in 1887 and dead in 1944, belongs to the generation of British illustrators working in the long shadow of Beardsley, alongside Harry Clarke and Kay Nielsen. He illustrated Arthur Ransome's Aladdin in 1919, Christine Chaundler's Arthur and His Knights in 1920, and Flecker's Hassan in 1924. His Crock of Gold was issued by Macmillan in London in 1926 carrying twelve color plates. The American printings, this one included, carry eight.

Product Details

Why It Belongs in Your Home

Buy this one open, not closed. The covers took water at some point and the left third of the front board is bleached, but the plates inside are untouched, and they are the whole point. Mackenzie's two Philosophers under their own shadows is a genuinely odd and beautiful image, and it holds a room from a stand or an easel the way a small framed print would, at a fraction of what a framed print costs.

It also carries its own paper trail, which is rarer than it sounds. A Sacramento bookshop label, a Christmas inscription from two women to a third, and that third woman's signature opposite. You can date it to the week it changed hands and name three of the four people involved, and all of it is in the book rather than on a tag someone wrote later.

Shelve it spine out and it is a quiet green book. Lay it open at the frontispiece on a table of Irish or fantasy material, or in a room where someone will actually pick it up, and it earns its place.