Frieda Hughes’s own copy, inscribed.
HUGHES, Ted (author). Leonard BASKIN (illustrator). A Primer of Birds. Lurley, Devon. The Gehenna Press. 1981. Signed

Tall 8vo., (282 x 155mm); publisher’s marbled paper-covered boards, both spine and upper board with onlaid paper labels titled in red and black, fore-, and lower edges untrimmed; pp. [44] + [iv], blanks, printed on Dover paper which was handmade in Maidstone Kent; with title-page beautifully printed in black and red, printed on the Gehenna Press’s nineteenth century Columbian; with 5 full-page wood-engraved plates printed from the blocks, and 2 half-page (one printed in full colour); a fine copy, both externally and internally.

First edition, one of a total of only 250 copies. This number 166 of only 225 copies, signed by both author and illustrator: 25 copies special copies were issued with an additional suite of the woodcuts.

A presentation copy inscribed by Ted Hughes in the year of his death to his daughter, Frieda Hughes and her then third husband, the Hungarian painter Lazlo Lukacs, “For Frieda and Laszlo love Daddy June 1998”.

Frieda Hughes (born 1960) is the only daughter, and eldest child, of Pulitzer Prize-winning American poet Sylvia Plath and England’s Poet Laureate Ted Hughes.  Her only sibling, Plath and Hughes’ son Nicholas, died by suicide at his home in Alaska in March 2009: he had long battled depression.  Frieda now lives on a farm in Wales. Apparently burdened by associations intrinsically bound up in much of the personal material inherited from her famous parents, she sold many of her books through Bonhams in 2023 stating, “They need homes, so that I no longer have to carry all the associations. So that, after I’m gone, the associations will continue – but other people will be responsible for that.”