Folio. 363pp. Printed in red and black on handmade paper. The opening line of each of the eight books is designed by Graily Hewitt and printed in red, and the other red initial letters are from an alphabet designed by Eric Gill for Utopia. This was the last of the great Ashendene folios, and the present copy is very fine in a unique binding designed and executed by bookbinder Michael Wilcox. Full red morocco over boards superimposed with gray onlays to create the spectral silhouette of a three-headed vulture with a human skull as its belly. Wilcox, in a copy of his letter to the commissioner of the binding explains that the bird "is intended to be an ashen symbol of the ravages of war." A helmeted and armored Thucydides is himself represented in red and black onlays, presiding over all he observes and recording it from the center of the spine. Archers, infantrymen, charioteers, and other soldiers march along the covers in their orderly rows, some pushing along captive men and women, along with images of shipwrecked triremes and the builders assembling walls. These Wilcox has arranged as friezes. Along the spine are orators, rendered as archetypes: "the hawk, the dogged agitator, the quixotic campaigner, and the dove." Their presence alerts the viewer to the political gamesmanship behind the particular stakes of the Peloponnesian Wars and gestures toward the continued jingoism that characterizes geopolitical conflicts. Eyes stamped in gilt watch on, scattered over the covers. Edges feature spears and turn-ins show spears and shields arranged as if in phalanx formation. Wilcox closes his missive to Norman by explaining his treatment of the edges of the text block: "Remembering Hornby's admonishment to bookbinders...not to cut the edges of his books, I could not bring myself to trim and gild the edges...in order to remove the line of stains across the fore-edge. Instead, I bleached out the marks leaf by leaf." A careful and exacting treatment of one of the major Classical texts, emblematic of Wilcox's work as one of the premier figurative bookbinders of the twentieth century. Housed in solander box. Very fine.