The Kiltartan History Book. Illustrated by Robert Gregory. Dublin: Maunsel, 1909. First Edition. Pp vii, 52, [4]. Publisher’s brown printed wrappers. Covers worn at spine, spotting to contents pages, overall a good copy of this fragile publication.

With a coloured frontispiece & three coloured plates in the text.

The Kiltartan History Book gets its title form the Barony of Kiltartan in which the author lived at Coole Park and where “I have heard a great number of the stories from beggars, pipers, traveling men, and such pleasant company.”

A chronological history of Ireland mixing myth and fact it was illustrated by the Lady Gregory’s son, Robert, who was killed while serving as a pilot during the First World War. An event that inspired Yeats’s poems ‘An Irish Airman Foresees His Death’ and ‘In Memory of Major Robert Gregory’.

The striking illustrations are drawn from ‘some delft figures, ornaments in a Kiltartan house.’