THE HOLY GRAIL: oh, the excitement when you find something you have looked for for a decade! This is the Ex Libris bookplate of the poet and publisher John Lehmann (1907-1987), and it’s especially thrilling (to me) because it’s a wood-engraving made in 1944 by the artist Keith Vaughan, whom Lehmann commissioned to produce numerous book cover designs and illustrations (and whose centenary exhibition I curated in 2012). Lehmann was an important figures in British literary life and queer history, the brother of writer Rosamund Lehmann and Beatrix Lehmann. After Cambridge, and working as a journalist in Vienna, he founded New Writing in 1936 which published writers and poets such as WH Auden, Christopher Isherwood and Stephen Spender, including the celebrated anthology of Spanish Civil War poetry ‘Poems for Spain’, and in 1940 it became Penguin New Writing (which he continued to edit). Lehmann joined Leonard and Virginia Woolf’s Hogarth Press in 1938 as Managing Director and in 1946 set up his own publishing house John Lehmann Publishing - with many of his books illustrated by Neo-Romantic artists such as Vaughan and John Minton. His autobiographical novel ‘In the Purely Pagan Sense’ is a fascinating account of gay literary life in the middle of the twentieth-century, and as a figure he connects so many writers, poets and artists in the 1940s and 50s. The bookplate is pure Neo-Romanticism and I especially like it as it relates to the theme of the exhibition and book I worked on in 2007: ‘Poets in the Landscape: The Romantic Spirit in British Art’ which explored the imagery of poets under trees in mid-century Britain, tracing it back to Samuel Palmer and William Blake. As a collector of Ex Libris - bookplates marking ownership of books - I am fascinated by the friendships, patronage and interests they reveal. This is a combination of all of these elements as well as being a very rare early print by Vaughan. It perfectly complements another one designed by Vaughan for the actor Michael Redgrave that I have in my collection, which is from the same period. I’ve reached Peak Niche Nerd #bookplate #modernbritishart #neoromanticism #johnlehmann #keithvaughan #hogarthpress (at Brighton and Hove) https://www.instagram.com/p/CJdXel_Fzkf/?igshid=1juvpylgyg6m8
