SPELLING IT OUT: In Honour of Brian Friel on his 80th Birthday.

First edition, first printing. Hardcover issue. Signed by the author. Limited edition. Original stitched fawn card wrappers laid by the publisher into green cloth-covered boards lettered in gilt to the spine. A fine copy, the binding square and firm, the cloth and gilt sharp, the inner wraps and contents sharp and clean. The contents are clean and bright throughout. A very attractive copy.

Signed by Seamus Heaney to the limitation page at the back of the book. 'Spelling It Out' was published on 9 January 2009 in wrappers and also this limited hardback edition of four hundred copies signed by the author, three hundred of which were for sale. A tribute to the Irish playwright Brian Friel to mark his eightieth birthday, it is organised as a series of short sections, each headed by a letter of Friel's name. As Heaney notes in the prefatory note, "I [...] thought it worth the risk to spell out some of the things we know and love and value about Brian by focussing on the letters of his name. So this is not so much an abecedary as a befrielery." Heaney greatly respected Friel and the essay includes much about his own debts to and affinities with a writer sometimes referred to as an Irish Chekhov. The final paragraph of the final section reads the letter L as for "letter, the first one Brian wrote to me after 'Death of a Naturalist' was published in 1966, a gesture that was generous, typical and of immense significance for me. It was an admission to the guild of makers, permission to draw up a stool to the edge of the magic circle, and as such an honour to be cherished and a standard to be lived up to ever since."