[Private Press: ‘The first (and only) title set, printed and published by the Janus Press at Bickley in Kent.] Printed play by Charles Duff: ‘An Irish Idyll’ (previously broadcast on the Home Service of the BBC).

See his entry in the Dictionary of National Biography. From the papers of Sylvia and Robert Lynd. Scarce: only three copies on JISC (Oxford, NLS and BL). 24pp, 12mo. Stapled. In blue printed wraps with flaps. Colophon on first page, with small indistinguishable device: ‘THE FIRST BOOKLET / set, printed and published by the / Janus Press at Bickley in Kent / 1933’. Title-page: ‘AN IRISH IDYLL / CHARLES DUFF / [crude vignette of shamrock] / Janus Press’. Information on reverse of title includes: ‘An Irish Idyll was first used by / The British Broadcasting Corporation / on the 12th. Of July MCMXXXIII’. Internally in good condition, on lightly-aged laid paper, with slightly rusty staples, in worn wraps. An unremarkable piece of printing in a sans serif font, presumably by Duff himself, who would shortly throw up his job at the Foreign Office, and abandon his wife and four children. There is no record of any other item by this imprint. A one-act play for three characters (Mr O’Toole, Widow O’Flaherty, Widow Malone), of between ‘twenty and thirty minutes’ duration, set in ‘the parlour of the house of the Widow O’Flaherty, in a village of County Cork, Ireland’: ‘The dialogue demands a rich Irish brogue of all the speakers’.