Everyman's Library: Poetry the Drama

by Ernest Rhys

Excerpt from Everyman's Library

By craftsmen and mean men, these pageants are played, And to commons and countrymen accustomably If better men and finer heads now come. What can be said?

234 pages, Paperback

First published July 16, 2015

About the author

Ernest Percival Rhys was an English writer, best known for his role as founding editor of the Everyman's Library series of affordable classics. He wrote essays, stories, poetry, novels and plays. He was born in London, and brought up in Carmarthen and Newcastle-upon-Tyne.

After working in the coal industry, he was employed doing editorial work on the Camelot Series of 65 reprints and translations from 1886, for five years, while he turned to writing as a profession. He was a founder member in 1890 of the Rhymer's Club in London, and a contributor to The Book of the Rhymers' Club (1893).

In 1906, he persuaded J. M. Dent, the publisher, for whom he was working on The Lyric Poets series, to start out on the ambitious Everyman project, aiming to publish 1,000 titles; the idea was to put out ten at a time. The target was eventually reached, ten years after Rhys died.