#john dreyfus

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Wood Engraving Wednesday

Scottish wood engraver, illustrator, and painter, Agnes Miller Parker (1895-1980) had already illustrated eight Limited Editions Club (LEC) productions before she embarked on this LEC edition of The Mayor of Casterbridge by Thomas Hardy (1840-1928), designed by British book designer John Dreyfus (1918-2002) and printed in New York at Bert Clarke's and David Way's Thistle Press in an edition of 1500 copies signed by the artist in 1964.

For this edition, Miller Parker created 16 full-page wood engravings, plus a dozen smaller engravings for the title page, colophon, and tailpieces, and sixteen historiated initials for the openings of 45 chapters. She had been working on her paintings when she was invited to illustrated Casterbridge. In accepting, she wrote: "I have been painting, for the change I like to give myself periodically, and feel fresh and ready to turn to engraving again." She produced the engravings in Glasgow and on the Isle of Arran, southwest of Glasgow in the Firth of Clyde. While on the island, she would take breaks from her work to go fishing, as recalled in an LEC Monthly Letter (Number 360, January 1964): "a change of pace that has an economic and humanitarian angle, because the fish she catches feed her three cats."

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Wood Engraving Wednesday

PETER REDDICK

This week we present a few of the wood engravings from the 35 wood engravings by the notable English wood engraver Peter Reddick (1924-2010) for the 1969 Limited Editions Club production of The Poems of Robert Browning, designed by John Dreyfus and printed at the University Printing House in Cambridge by University master printer Brooke Crutchley in a limited edition of 1500 copies signed by the artist.

After contracting polio in 1958, making it difficult for him to pursue his painting efforts, Peter Reddick turned to wood engraving as his primary medium. He illustrated more than 50 books and is especially noted for his interpretations of the works of Thomas Hardy. With the diminishment of wood engraving in the 1960s and 1970s, Reddick helped to sustain the medium during that time, and is credited, along with contemporaries such as George Tute, David Gentleman, and Simon Brett, with reviving the medium in the 1980s to its more elevated status today.

View another wood engraving by Peter Reddick.

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Marbled Monday

It’s time for another Marbled Monday! This week we have some gorgeous marbling found in the binding of C-S The Master Craftsman by American book collector and businessman Norman H. Strouse and British book designer and historian of print John Dreyfus. The book includes two essays about English artist and bookbinder T.J. Cobden-Sanderson, each by one of the authors. It was published in 1969 by the Adagio Press in Harper Woods, Michigan and printed by Leonard Bahr, who founded the Adagio Press. Printed in Palatino type designed by Hermann Zapf, the book is printed on handmade Tovil paper, which was printed dry (usually this type of paper is best printed on damp). Bahr explains in the colophon that there were many issues faced while printing the book, namely time (owing to the fact that “The Adagio Press is a sparetime printing activity, confined to the evening and weekend hours available after normal employment”) and the number of pages able to be set at one time due to the amount of type owned by the press. The book was printed in an edition of 329 copies. Our copy is another gift from our friend Jerry Buff.

Oddly enough, the 2-page colophon doesn’t mention the marbled paper used for the binding! The marbling pattern isn’t to be found in my trusty reference from the University of Washington Libraries and appears to be a unique, floral or foliage-inspired design. Done in cream, black, and red, the pattern features flowers or leaves with the colors swirled together. It’s interesting and lovely, especially when you get up really close to see the swirly interstitial bits. 

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-- Alice, Special Collections Department Manager

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Wood Engraving Wednesday

This week we present a few wood-engraved illustrations by the noted British wood engraver Reynolds Stone for a Limited Editions Club production of The Poems of Alfred, Lord Tennyson, designed by John Dreyfus and printed in 1974 by master printer Brooke Crutchley at the Cambridge University Printing House in an edition of 2000 copies signed by the artist.

Stone created 25 wood engravings for this publication. In the January 1975 Monthly Letter of The Limited Editions Club it is noted that Stone . . .

. . . was born and educated at Eton, and in 1927 entered Magdalene College, Cambridge. Three years later he was the first graduate to be taken into the Cambridge University Press in a newly initiated apprenticeship program. There he soon met Eric Gill. . . . Gill gave Stone an engraving tool and encouraged him to engrave an alphabet on wood -- his first and only lesson. . . . In his spare time he collected old wood-engraving blocks and fine books, . . . which included Eric Gill’s The Four Gospels as well as Birds and Quadrupeds, illustrated by the eighteenth-century artist Thomas Bewick, . .  the formative books of Stone’s future style. . . .

His career was launched; soon it was fashionably necessary to have a bookplate, letter heading, or monogram designed by Stone. Since the death of Eric Gill no one has equaled his skill.

Stone is also a Tennyson enthusiast who, upon receiving this commission, wrote twice to make sure we were including his favorite poems.

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Wood Engraving Wednesday

This week we present a few original wood engravings by British painter and wood engraver Richard Shirley Smith from the Limited Editions Club (LEC) publication of The Poems of Percy Bysshe Shelley, designed by John Dreyfus and printed by Brooke Crutchley in 1971 at the University Printing House in Cambridge, England, in an edition of 1500 copies signed by the artist.

Richard Shirley Smith trained at the Slade School of Fine Art and in Rome, where he developed a lifelong interest in Classical architecture and form, which are evident in some of these engravings. He produced 45 wood engravings for this publication and exhibited the first pulls at London’s Waterhouse Gallery a few months before this edition was complete. In a letter to the LEC expressing his delight with the proofs, Smith discussed his absorption with Shelley’s poetry while preparing the engravings. It was a matter, he wrote, of ”allowing the poems to make pictures in my mind, and then of doing them in a such a style that Shelley himself would find no difficulty in looking at them.” We think that Shelley, who also maintained an interest in classical antiquity, would have been quite pleased.

In choosing Smith for this project the LEC’s American publishers noted that “He has done a good amount of teaching, and his wood engravings for English publishers have been widely admired, It is now the turn of American bibliophiles to enjoy the finesse that marks Richard Shirley Smith’s draftsmanship and technique.” The type displayed here is Bembo, a perfect match for both Shelley’s poems and Smith’s wood engravings.

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Typography Tuesday

THE CURWEN PRESS TYPES AND BORDERS

The Curwen Press was found in 1863 by Rev, John Curwen, originally to print music. His grandson Harold Curwen took control of the business in 1916 and was soon joined by Oliver Simon in 1920, transforming what was essentially a family job-printing business into a notable fine-press publishing enterprise. The two made a great impact on the typographic world of the 1920s, with their well-designed types and borders, fine illustration work, and their attention to design and color. The Press maintained its reputation for quality until it closed its doors in 1984, with its considerable collection passing to Cambridge University Library, including much of its distinguished stock of type. Much of the credit for rescuing the types from the melting pot goes to Ian Mortimer, artist, designer, printer, and proprietor of I. M. Imprimit in London.

The selection displayed here of borders and typefaces from the Curwen Press were compiled and proofed from the original types by Ian Mortimer, printed offset by Adrian Lack at the Senecio Press, and were inserted as part of John Dreyfus’s article “The Curwen Press Collection in Cambridge University Library” in Matrix 5, Winter 1985, pp. 23-33. All the borders shown here were commissioned by Curwen for its exclusive use. The typefaces also include some exclusive designs, such as Curwen Sans designed by Harold Curwen, initials by Jan Van Krimpen and Percy Smith, and some typefaces particularly associated with the Press, such as Walbaum. 

Borders and typeface names, along with their designers are printed beneath each specimen. Besides Curwen, Van Krimpen, and Smith, other designers of note whose designs are displayed here include Albert Auspurg, Henry Ball, Edward Bawden, Harry Carter, Rudolf Koch, and Paul Nash.

Matrix 5 was printed in October 1985 by John and Rosalind Randle at the Whittington Press in Andoversford, Gloucestershire, in an edition of 715 copies, and is another fine donation from our friend Jerry Buff.

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Here’s another ex-libris from our special collections, this from the esteemed typographer and so much more, John G. Dreyfus (1918-2002). Besides his ground-breaking work in typography, he was a great book historian, and a fine printer, all attributes reflected in his book plate that was designed by the well-known wood engraver and book designer, Joan Hassall...