STAFF PICK OF THE WEEK
My Staff pick for the week is our Limited Editions Club printing of Beowulf, with illustrations by Lynd Ward. My previous staff pick, Idylls of the King printed by Limited Editions Club, was also illustrated by Lynd Ward and I was interested in finding more of his work! This edition of Beowulf, with a verse translation by Wisconsin scholar and author William Ellery Leonard, was designed by Eugene M. Ettenberg in Janson, Bembo italic, and Libra types and printed on specially-made Ticonderoga Text paper in 1952 at The Gallery Press in New York in an edition of 1500 copies. Ward drew the lithographs on the plates himself, and they were printed in three colors by the Duenewald Printing Corporation. Also shown here is the book’s quarter binding with gold and silver stamped buckram and a patterned paper over boards handmade by Ingeborg Börjeson in Stockholm
Beowulf is an Anglo-Saxon poetic epic, written in Old English, that began it’s life as an oral ballad. Scholars argue over when it was composed and written, and some have tried to claim that it was never part of the oral tradition but instead composed directly to text. J.R.R. Tolkein, a familiar name, was the scholar who dated the work, as part of the oral tradition, to just after the Christian conversion of England, 700 CE.