With the return of travel comes the expanded possibility for seeking out new treasures and pleasures to offer to our customers. The following list reflects the sort of variety we encountered in our search for the rare and the unusual.
In the language of images, there are common tongues that speak in words we know—shape, line, color—about what we cannot yet understand. The generation of British artists and illustrators working at the turn of the twentieth century through the interwar period achieved such a mastery. The likes of Arthur and Georgie Gaskin, Edward Burne-Jones, Kate Greenaway, and Paul Nash drew upon the heavy lore and artistic heritage of the British Isles, the hope of the new millennium, and the grief of war after war after war. The romance of their illustrations, from Burne-Jones’s sensitive work for the Kelmscott Chaucer, exemplified in proofed and published leaves presented here, to Gaskin’s familiar countryside vistas and intimate portraits, sends pangs of longing across time to the viewer today. In this catalogue, we invite you to explore the detail and devotion with which they translated the world, and find in it both comfort and fascination.
The bridge between the book and the human body traverses language and feeling. We describe backs as supple, heads and feet as sure or firm, a lip as stained or rough. Is it any wonder that a poetry of words so readily can meet the poetry of the body? Our current e-catalog embraces that intimate and inimitable connection that brings a vocabulary to the shape of ourselves.
The subject of this e-catalogue is the examination of Eric Gill's considerable talents in the book arts. From his work for Count Kessler at the Cranach Press and Robert Gibbings at the Golden Cockerel Press, to the small communities he formed at Ditchling with Hilary Pepler, Gill's prolific output was enduring and his influence on future artists immense. His biographer, Fiona MacCarthy, concludes that he was “a most extraordinary person,” which dovetails perfectly with something Gill himself wrote in 1934: “Art itself has become an extraordinary thing—the activity of peculiar people—people who become more and more peculiar as their activity becomes more and more extraordinary.”
We close out our series of lists featuring books-about-books with a nod to the self-referential nature that these works tend to take. The preservation of stories about printing, typography, bookbinding, and book collecting lies at the core of this selection, covering a variety of bookish worlds, from the booksellers imagined in Henry Morris’s San Serriffe, to the Typestickers of Los Angeles. The high level of production also befits the texts they contain: consider George Parker Winship’s address on William Caxton, delivered to the Club of Odd Volumes in 1908 and printed at the Doves Press; or the indulgently extravagant entrée into the world of books and book collecting that is The Colophon—available here as a nearly complete run and with the first part in original slipcases.
