London: Chatto & Windus 1904. First edition, first issue with pictorial cover decorated in white, but with later publisher's ads at the back. Only 700 copies of the first issue of Baron Corvo's most famous work were published. Woolf A6a. Corvo's masterpiece springs from a profound sense of persecution, of martyrdom: "I believe that someone carelessly had lied, that someone clumsily had blundered, and that all concerned were determined not to own themselves, or anyone else but me, to be in the wrong." Hadrian the Seventh "is a sounding board for the years of disappointment and bitterness Rolfe himself experienced, for the checkered, insolvent life of rejection and refusal he was to lead right to the end. The book is also a megalomaniacal projection born of a poor novelist's slightly crackpated need to settle scores from arguably the most singular spiritual height in Western Christendom, the chair of St. Peter himself.... The Pope is a coherent and fully realized double of his creator, as oblique, learned, and fussified a fellow as ever lived, a master of contumely and weird detail. He tells his confessors, 'As for the Faith, I found it comfortable. As for the Faithful, I found them intolerable.' ... In these matchless pages filled with baroque sentences and arcane vocabulary, entitlement is a leitmotif; the words 'superior' and 'supremacy' are repeated throughout like mantras ... it was Rolfe's determination to escape the miserable circumstances of his own existence that allowed him to fabricate this book, in which fantasized compensation for worldly disappointment is converted into a fully and brilliantly imagined alternate reality." - Alexander Theroux, Introduction to Hadrian the Seventh (N. Y.: NYRB, 2001). 8vo, original purple cloth, stamped in gilt on the spine, with pictorial design on the front cover in white. A superb copy of a rare book which, in our experience and with the single exception of this copy which passed through our hands once before, is impossible to find in collector's condition. The novel was issued in a printed dust jacket, but it is virtually unknown: the bibliographer's knowledge of it was based solely on the remnant belonging to the Bodleian Library copy, in which the jacket is pasted into the book.