What makes a book desirable apart from the important fact that you like it? Rarity plays a big part; will you get another chance to buy a copy? Provenance too - who owned it, did they have an association with the book? Leading on from provenance is who else might have held and enjoyed that copy. The possible connection.

So, there I was, browsing a little-known collection of books in central London, when my attention was caught by a volume by the great Persian poet, Ferdowsi, the Calcutta printed Poems of Ferdowsi (1785). Pretty much all early Calcutta editions are rare. Printing started there in 1777 in a ramshackle sort of way, and the staple diet of the early presses were newspapers and almanacs. The main market was officers of the East India Company (EIC), and print runs tended to be small.  When the climate, hostile to printed matter, and the vicissitudes of a long journey back to England are factored in, it is little wonder that the survival rate of these books is low. Top marks for rarity.

Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh, or Book of Kings, written around 1000 CE, is the great epic poem of Iran, it tells the story of Iran’s ancient history and is very long. The translator, John Champion only managed to produce one volume, still the first substantial translation into English, before the poor chap succumbed to some sort of breakdown, and no more was published.

Champion, has inscribed this copy for Lady Jones, not only a distinguished scholar in her own right, but also the wife of Sir William Jones, the great Orientalist, to whom the book is dedicated. Superb provenance.

I had to have it. When I looked at the book more closely, I noticed that it bore the bookplates of Richard Gregory of Coole in Ireland. It also had his name in gilt at the foot of the spine – something I had somehow overlooked before. He had obviously added the fine green calf binding, the spine tooled with gilt lyres, it looked as Irish as a pint of Guinness. Another plus.

A bit of research turned up that Richard’s father, Robert, had been chairman of the EIC, possibly explaining the presence of the book in the library, but it wasn’t so much looking back as looking forward, down the generations, that the real interest to me of this already wonderful book became apparent.

Coole eventually became the home of Isabella Augusta, later Lady Gregory, founder of the Abbey Theatre in Dublin, patron of W.B. Yeats, Shaw, and Synge, and a prime mover in the Irish literary revival. Yeats often visited Coole and indeed one of his greatest poems is The Wild Swans at Coole. It seems inevitable that on one of his visits, looking round the library, Yeats would have been drawn to the Ferdowsi, picked it off the shelf and read it. Poets born a thousand years apart, but both sharing a great interest in myth, both aware of the importance of poetry in forging the identity of a nation. What a connection.

What happened to the library after Lady Gregory’s death in 1932? According to a contemporary report in the Galway Observer, it was sold for the derisory sum of £50.

For me, this book has pretty much everything, a very Cool[e] copy!