26 letterpress scrolls. Handset in Lutetia type and printed on damp, BFK Rives paper. Scroll "A" is on a single sheet, but the others are several sheets joined together, the longest are nearly 15' in length and the usual height is 15½". Housed in individual tubes.

Very rare complete set of Wilder Bentley the Elder's epic poem, produced in his retirement years. "Bentley is a man of letters who lives with a printing press...The early scrolls are largely narrative and descriptive about travels in Europe, about teaching, about printing. The later Scrolls are more epigrammatic, about people, about current events, about environment. All are written in more or less traditional English poetic diction, with occasional sly puns." (Wulling, A Comp's-Eye-View of Wilder Bentley and the Archetype Press, 1983). Bentley himself says of the scroll format, "the scroll, like Aladdin's magic carpet, conveys the reader through the aesthetic space-time continuum, ever rolling up behind him as it unrolls before him, thus revealing the poem as a whole or in the round so that it can be read column by column..." (xerox notes enclosed in this lot). This set once belonged to Margaret Bentley Sevcenko, Wilder's sister. Bentley gave sets to institutions and to friends, but his poem was not sold commercially. The stated edition size varies, from 30 to 100 copies, but Bentley informed a friend in the 1980's that only 26 sets of these scrolls were ever produced, with a few extra copies sometimes being run off, but those not contained in special tubes. In this set, scroll "A" is in the original mailing tube (addressed to Bentley's sister), scrolls "B", "C", "F" and "G" are without original tubes, scrolls "D" and "E" are in linen tubes, and the balance are in hand-made Japanese paper tubes with printed labels. It appears that Bentley was experimenting with ideas for the tubes (or lack thereof) at the beginning stages of the project.