Here we present some of the 24 original wood engravings by illustrator, book designer, and fine-press publisher Barry Moser (b. 1940) for the 1981 Limited Editions Club production of Homer's Odyssey, designed by Moser and printed in an edition of 2000 signed copies by the legendary master printer Harold McGrath at the Hampshire Typothetae in West Hatfield, Massachusetts (co-founded by Moser and McGrath in 1977).
The creation of these engravings was a four-year endeavor for Moser. He studied the arms and armor of the Ancient Greeks, made notes on Hellenic representations of animals, rituals, and people, and studied black- and red-figured vases in visits to museums in London, Boston, and New York. He writes that "My initial impulse was to parallel the frontality of the story with frontal images: men and monsters, gods and demigods, tinted with historically accurate paraphernalia and costume, sharply and closely focused." But other influences over those years of study . . .
pushed me away from the narrow initial impulses and stretched my imagination toward a broader, more catholic emphasis. I came to depend less on the local interest of costume and artifact, and to concentrate on human tenderness and violence, on simile and metaphor, on landscape and faces. I chose to see Homer's characters close-up. Not their actions or figures, but their faces -- the faces of Everyman. . . . contemporary man, anonymous man, ordinary man in his quest for self, in his quest for home.
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