Listed on OCLC as "fiction" and "poem" - this note seems most decisive: Poem./ Originally published separately in 1881. Cf. BAL 311./ Colophon: "This manuscript 'Friar Jerome's beautiful book', a poem by Thomas Bailey Aldrich, was designed, written out, and illustrated by Alberto Sangorski. London, 1917. This manuscript will not be duplicated."/ Manuscript on unusually fine white vellum, silk inserts between all pages, richly illuminated with many drop-letter initials, two miniatures on the title-page, one each on pages 13, 16, 18, and two full page color plates./ Bound by Sangorski in dark blue levant morocco; back with raised bands, four panels richly tooled in gold with red inlaid dots in quatrefoils in each panel; sides outlined with three fillets and a fourth which breaks inward at the corners to form arabesques with sapphires in center of quatrefoils in each corner, four red morocco inlays (one near each side) richly tooled in gold leaves with three white flowers inlaid in each, in the center of cover a pointed oval design richly illuminated in gold with an arabesque inlay in red morocco and in the center a large ruby; back side the same except the inlaid red dots replace the jewels. Doublures dark blue silk moiréwith wide edge of blue morocco with five fillets and two broken line fillets; guard sheets lined with same moiré; in a blue morocco snap-fastened case, lined with padded white moiréand decorated outside with five fillets and title and author.
Lehigh owns a less elaborate copy.
Born in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, Thomas Bailey Aldrich moved with his father to New Orleans, Louisiana at the age o
