#private presses

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Typography Tuesday

As a letterpress printer, our dear, late friend Dennis Bayuzick had a fondness for type and type design, and was a great collector of typefaces, books on type, and typographic printing. His estate's recent donation to Special Collections reflects this. Among the typographic works in the donation is this small type display book, Specimens of Metal Type from the collection of Tara McLeod's Pear Tree Press printed in Auckland, New Zealand in an edition of 120 copies in 2000.

Pear Tree Press was founded in 1985, and over the years McLeod has built an impressive collection of metal type. McLeod writes, "This eclectic collection of types, borders and ornaments has been salvaged from now defunct commercial letterpress printers, many of whom worked with numerous metal typefaces in a variety of different sizes and styles."

You can view description of the typefaces displayed here by clicking or tapping on the ALT description in the bottom left of each image.

View other books from the collection of Dennis Bayuzick.

View more Typography Tuesday posts.

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It’s Fine Press Friday!

On this first #Fine Press Friday of 2023, we present a couple of items from one of the more obscure 20th-century American private presses, the Cygnet Press of Cambridge, Massachusetts. Cygnet Press was founded in 1928 and co-managed by two Harvard academics, George Parker Winship (1871-1952) and Philip Hofer (1898-1984). Winship was the long-time curator for both the John Carter Brown Collection at Brown University and the Harry Elkins Widener Collection at Harvard University. Hofer had been curator for the Spencer Collection of the New York Public Library and assistant director of the Morgan Library before founding the Department of Printing and Graphic Arts at Harvard’s Houghton Library. Both librarians maintained a strong interest in fine press printing and printing history.

The first book off the press was a 1934 facsimile edition of Vita de Sancto Hieronymo (the first eight images), an Italian translation of the letters of St. Jerome by Matteo da Ferrara, originally printed in Ferrara by Lorenzo di Rossi da Valenza in 1497. In a 1934 letter that accompanied a different copy of this book, Hofer wrote: “The little book which accompanies this note is one which George Parker Winship and I set by hand and printed a few years ago. It amused us, and, I hope, will amuse you. Of course we would do it differently now - that is always the way!"

The last two images are from a very slim booklet entitled Tanatlus, the fourth imprint from the press, printed for friends in 1937 in an edition of 200 copies. The publication focuses on the color wood engraving of the punishment of the Greek mythological figure Tantalus. The engraving, by the master Czech American wood engraver, illustrator, and type and book designer Rudolph Ruzicka (1883-1978), was designed after a watercolor by Hans Holbein the Younger, “which the best woodcutter of Holbein’s time could not have bettered.” 

The original watercolor, conjectured to have been intended as a jeweler’s design, had been acquired by someone in Winship’s and Hofer’s circle in 1936. Ruzicka made seven blocks printed in different colors and values “to make an almost perfect counterpart of the original . . . .” To explain the image, the Greek texts of Homer and Pindar and the Latin text of Horace, along with English translations, are printed as part of the booklet.

Our copies of these two publications are gifts from our friend Jerry Buff.

View more posts with work by Rudolph Ruzicka.

View more Fine Press Friday posts.

View more posts with wood engravings!

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Wood Engraving Wednesday

As the holiday season approaches, we offer these little wood engravings by American artist Thomas W. Nason, a wood engraver we were unfamiliar with until we came across this little 1961 Christmas keepsake from the publisher Holt, Rinehart & Winston of Robert Frost’s poem The Wood-Pile, printed in New York at Joseph Blumenthal’s Spiral Press. A self-taught artist and wood engraver, fellow New Englander Nason became the principal illustrator for Frost’s works. As American art historian and curator Amanda C. Burdan points out:

Blumenthal recommended Nason to Frost when the poet and his publishers were looking for a new illustrator for Frost’s poetry. Never were Nason’s engravings more closely aligned with poetry than when he illustrated the verse of Robert Frost. Frost’s status as the quintessential rural New Englander, writing in simple, direct, and yet forceful terms about American life makes a ready comparison to Nason’s life and work. Frost’s poems, like Nason’s prints, pay tribute to rural life in familiar terms. While Nason was known as the “poet engraver of New England,” Frost was revered as “the poet farmer of New England.”. . . The works of Nason and Frost parallel each other in their straightforwardness of presentation but also in their traces of underlying despair. By the end of their lives Frost’s and Nason’s reputations were forever intertwined. 

View more posts about the Spiral Press.

View more posts with wood engravings!

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Wood Engraving Wednesday

JOHN FARLEIGH

John Farleigh (1900-1965) was an English wood engraver noted especially for his work as a book illustrator. He was one of several engravers who worked on projects for the Golden Cockerel Press in London, one of the premier fine-press publishers of the 20th century. Presented here are wood engravings Farleigh produced for Australian-English writer Jack Lindsay’s short work Storm at Sea printed in a limited edition of 250 copies signed by the author at the Golden Cockerel Press in 1935. 

John Farleigh was trained at the London County Council Central School of Arts, now the the Central School of Art and Design, where he studied with noted English wood engraver Noel Rooke, and would later teach there himself, mentoring the next generation of fine wood engravers, including the outstanding British engraver Monica Poole. For Storm at Sea, the author Jack Lindsay offered to provide his own illustrations, which would have been drawings translated into metal plates. The owner of Golden Cockerel at the time Christopher Sanford, however, preferred to maintain the press’s tradition of using wood engravings and offered the job to Farleigh, even though Stanford did not have a very high opinion of his work. In a correspondence related to hiring Farleigh for the job, Sanford noted that Farleigh “is not as good an artist as Agnes Miller Parker, Blair Hughes-Stanton or [Gertrude] Hermes & has only illustrated two important books.”

Even the authors for the 2002 A History of The Golden Cockerel Press 1920-1960, Roderick Cave and Sarah Manson, in assessing Farleigh’s work for this book, write that the engravings were “technically very accomplished, they had the correct historical detail but were also rather dull.” We beg to differ. They are indeed very accomplished, but in our opinion, they are far from dull, and we think they stand up fairly well against the work of Parker, Hughes-Stanton, and Hermes.

For comparison, view our posts on the works of Parker, Hughes-Stanton, and Hermes.

View more posts on Golden Cockerel Press editions.

View more posts with wood engravings!

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A Sketchy Caturday

These sketches of relaxing felines are from Long Time Ago by Pete & Sheila Rigg, musicians in the Covenrty Folk scene, with drawings by Leicester illustrator Kathie Layfield. This little booklet was hand set and printed by Toni and Athena Tara Savage in an edition of 90 copies on handmade paper at their New Broom Private Press in Leicester, England, in 1981.

There are only a couple of poems by the Riggs in this little chapbook, and we don’t see how they relate to cats, but we sure do like Layfield’s sketches of kitties!

View more Caturday posts.

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Finely engraved frontispiece to William Morris’s ‘News from nowhere’ (the Kelmscott Press edition), a work which combined his socialist utopian ideals with science fiction.

William Morris,  News from nowhere, or, An epoch of rest : being some chapters from a Utopian romance.  Hammersmith: Kelmscott Press, 1892, Alexander Turnbull Library, RPr KELM MORR 1892

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and our Private Presses Collection

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Printer’s device of the Essex House Press 

A printer’s device or printer’s mark usually appears at the end of a book in what is called the colophon and it is particulary associated today with the private press movement -- hand-printed books dating from the late 19th century to the present.

The Essex House Press, founded in 1898 by C.R. Ashbee, is named after the London workshops of the Guild of Handicraft which was based at Essex House on the Mile End Road in London’s East End. The Press and the Guild later moved to Chipping Campden. This particular printer’s device is a dianthus which was also the emblem of the Guild (but with different design) where C.R. Ashbee was a founding member.

A mornynge remem-braunce (1906)