Wood Engraving Wednesday
From the same anonymous gift we mentioned yesterday is this Literary Guild edition of English novelist and travel writer Alec Waugh’s (Evelyn Waugh’s older brother) travel memoir to the tropics, Hot Countries, with wood engravings (despite that the title page says they are woodcuts) by American wordless novel artist and wood engraver Lynd Ward, printed for the Guild in Rahway, N. J. by Quinn & Boden Company in 1930. The text and even some of the wood engravings (there are about 20) have a decidedly imperialist quality about them (an earlier incarnation of the text was entitled Coloured Countries). Still, we love the drama and the movement of line in Ward’s engravings.
The first edition was originally published in New York by Farrar and Rinehart in 1930. The Literary Guild, founded in 1927 as a competitor to the Book of the Month Club, was and remains a mail order book club selling low cost editions of contemporary titles to its members. The chair of its editorial board at the time was the American scholar and critic Carl Van Doren and the titles selected by the board to be reprinted were published on the same date as the trade editions.
View other posts with illustrations by Lynd Ward.
View more posts with wood engravings!
