The Orde Poynton Collection

In the hundred and fifty years from 1800 to the middle of the twentieth century, the fine illustrated book tradition in Britain passed through several stages. The dominant technique of hand-coloured aquatint was challenged briefly by lithography, which became the norm commercial publications.

Artists and designers reacted against what they saw as the vulgarity of bright chromo-lithography. They returned to the discipline and aesthetic unity of the relief methods: wood-engraving and woodcut for images and decorations, and letterpress for the text. The excellent example of the Kelmscott Press in the 1890s was revived in the books produced at private presses in the 1920s and 1930s. Some commercial publishers attempted to popularise past achievements in the illustration of books, to make them available to all.

In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, most illustrations in books were made by the technique of aquatint applied over an etched design. Aquatint is a method of intaglio printing from a metal plate. It was developed to imitate, in multiple copies, the subtle tonal effects of watercolour painting. Often the aquatints, printed in black, were then hand-coloured. The subjects of these illustrated books range from travellers' notes and reminiscences to novels and poetry.

One of the greatest illustrators in the aquatint medium was Thomas Rowlandson, noted for his energetic and humorous portrayals of English character. In The microcosm of London, three volumes published by Rudolph Ackermann between 1808 and 1810, Rowlandson drew the figures which populate the London buildings drawn by the architect Augustus Pugin. The book is basically a tourist guide to the capital city, including such attractions as asylums and prisons. It appeared originally in monthly instalments in Ackermann’s Poetical magazine. The artists showed the memorable sights of London in the last years of the reign of George Ill.

From 1811 to 1830 under the Prince Regent (George IV from 1820) England saw the Napoleonic Wars against France, food riots, workers' opposition to the effects of the Industrial Revolution and agitation for the abolition of the slave trade. It was a time of moral and artistic licence and great social change. Rowlandson depicted many individuals and classes, and both sexes, among the English people he observed.

The comic verses of The English dance of death, 1815—16, and The dance of life, 1817, were written under the pseudonym 'Dr Syntax' by the old Etonian William Combe, while he was in prison for debt. Inserted in the back of the Australian National Gallery's copy of the first title are handwritten letters by Combe to his creditors. The books were inspired by the sixteenth-century masterpiece of engraving by Hans Holbein, The dance of death. In a reversal of most illustration, the artist Rowlandson first drew the scenes for Combe, who then wrote his accompanying couplets. It seems that the author and artist never met — a unique but successful form of collaboration.

The history of the Royal residences, 1819, was another guide to notable English places. Many artists were commissioned for these three volumes, which are known for their atmosphere and detail. Besides satisfying curiosity about the Royal family and their many grand dwellings, the books supplied a visual context for some of Britain’s history. As with the Rowlandson books, hand-colouring was done by employees of the publishers. The artist, who had drawn the original plate for aquatinting, then painted one print with watercolours. This was the model to be followed by those who were hand-colouring the remaining prints for the book.

The newer technique of lithography was used by Thomas Shotter Boys for his series of beautifully executed scenes of the changing city, Original views of London as it is, 1842. Boys portrayed the inhabitants, the businesses and activities of the streets, the continuing roadworks and extraordinary events like a balloon flying overhead. The artist inserted his presence either by showing himself sketching or by signing his name as a street sign or on a tradesman’s basket. The combination of elegant architecture and kindly, truthful renditions of contemporary life makes Boys's realisation of his surroundings historically valuable and artistically memorable.

William Morris was an influential figure in Victorian England: writer, designer, art theorist, socialist and businessman. Morris despised the poorly designed and ill-made results of mass production, and wished to return to the medieval values of harmony and skilled craft. He wanted excellence for all — beautifully furnished houses, clothes and books which would 'elevate English taste'. Three decades after establishing a workshop which made everything from tapestries to tiles and wallpapers, Morris set up the Kelmscott Press in the 1890s in order to make exquisite books.

Morris designed new typefaces which were modelled after late Gothic handwriting and early Renaissance printing. His ornamented capital letters and initial words evoke the illuminated manuscripts made by medieval monks. The relief technique of woodcut was chosen for the decorations, borders and illustrations to fit the relief printing method of letterpress used for the words. Some headings were in red to relieve the solemnity of solid black print on the white page.

Plants and other natural forms were the inspiration for Morris. He used rose flowers, leaves and stems in a stylised pattern to form the frame for one large page. Negative and positive borders are counterpoised in the ornate designs which make up the Kelmscott books' abstracted, beautiful title pages.

As well as borders and letters, many of the volumes contain woodcuts and wood-engravings by artists sympathetic to Morris's aims. Edward Burne-Jones, a friend since university days, was by the 1890s a distinguished academic oil painter. His early, more radical days as an artist behind him, Burne-Jones illustrated twelve Kelmscott Press books with elegant, elongated figures in mannered poses. Morris employed expert engravers, including W. H. Hooper, to carve Burne-Jones's drawings onto wooden blocks for printing.

Burne-Jones delineated his figures with a very flat style of outlining. He invigorated compositions such as Angels receiving souls into the Heavenly paradise' from The golden legend, 1892, by using sweeping curves for the wall and smaller rhythms for the angels' wings. Lighter elements show up against dark backgrounds with intricate patterning, here flowering plants and a starry sky. The richly ornamental effect is intensified by Morris’s border with its entwined looping stems.

Walter Crane also contributed to the Kelmscott Press. His images are much more concerned with the narrative than Burne-Jones's, which often have an other-worldly air. Crane's pilgrims have the requisite flavour of the Middle Ages to accompany Morris's 'medieval' tale, The story of the Glittering Plain, 1894.

Although other artists' pictures enliven some of the Kelmscott books, it is the elements of design and co-ordinating genius of William Morris that dominate. Ironically, his aesthetic and political aims — for clear, readable books of universal appeal — were hardly realised. The Gothic styles of type and decoration are sometimes too dense to read easily, while the cost of handmade paper, vellum covers and hand-printing meant that the works were far too expensive for most people to buy. The fifty-three projects which Morris designed for the Kelmscott Press, published between 1891 and 1898, are today valued highly for their artistic unity and extraordinary standards of production.

Christine Dixon

The period between the two world wars in Britain witnessed an extraordinary flowering of the private press movement. The private press was distinguished from its commercial counterpart by the choice of paper, typeface, binding and illustration. The book was conceived as an aesthetic object: hand-printing prevailed over machine-printing and editions were limited. The tradition of fine printing and book design established by William Morris's Kelmscott Press during the 1890s found a new audience among connoisseurs and bibliophiles in the post-war years.

The proliferation of private presses during the 1920s was to some extent a reaction to the overall decline in the quality of book design that had occurred in the trade during the first world war and the years immediately thereafter. Moreover, wood-engraving, which ever since the time of Thomas Bewick in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries had traditionally been associated with book illustration in England, underwent a major revival at the start of the 1920s. Many of the leading English wood-engravers of the day — Eric Gill, Eric Ravilious, Blair Hughes-Stanton, among others — found a ready outlet for their talents in book illustration for the private press.

The best-known of the private presses was the Golden Cockerel Press, established in 1924 by Robert Gibbings, himself a prolific wood-engraver and illustrator. In the nine years that he controlled the management of the press until he was forced to sell it in 1933, Gibbings published nearly sixty volumes, almost a third of which he had designed and illustrated himself.

Eric Gill’s long association with the Golden Cockerel Press began in 1925 when he received his first major commission to illustrate the Song of Songs. This delightful volume already shows Gill’s mastery of black-and-white wood-engraving, his characteristic spare and lucid line, and his treatment of voluptuous subject-matter within a religious context. Six years later, in 1931, came the culmination of career as an illustrator with the publication of the Four Gospels: here a medievalising tendency is discernible through the incorporation of figurative illustration within initial capitals or words. Such storiated designs, as they are technically called, were commonplace in medieval book illustration. It is not surprising then that Gill adopted this manner for his illustration of great masterpiece The Canterbury tales, which appeared in four volumes between 1928 and 1931. Another important wood-engraver who consistently worked for the Golden Cockerel Press from the 1930s was John Buckland Wright, whose technically proficient illustrations of literary texts were often charged with erotic overtones.

Natural history and scenes of country life appear side by side with literary works as the stock-in-trade of private press publishing between the wars. John Nash made twenty full-page wood-engraved illustrations for a botanical book entitled Poisonous plants, published by Frederick Etchells and Hugh Macdonald in 1927. For this handsomely produced volume, Nash also supplied a witty introduction in which he described his selection of British poisonous plants as 'a community of elegant malefactors, inhabiting a variety of situations from churchyard to the sea-shore'. For the Nonesuch Press, the principal rival of the Golden Cockerel Press, Eric Ravilious was commissioned to illustrate The writings of Gilbert White of Selbome, that much-loved classic of natural history in an eighteenth-century English village. The gentle bucolic wood-engravings that Ravilious designed as head-pieces for this book recall the vignettes of country life engraved by Thomas Bewick for his natural histories.

While wood-engraving, with its advantage of compatibility with letterpress, was the chief technique for the illustration of private press publications, intaglio and stencilling processes were also used to great effect during this period. The Welsh poet David Jones engraved on copper ten interpretations of Coleridge’s The rime of the ancient mariner, which Douglas Cleverdon published in 1929, a book which revealed one poet's sensitive visualisation of another's work. The American E. McKnight Kauffer won his reputation in post-war England with his modernist posters and book illustrations. His designs were often hand-coloured through stencils at the Curwen Press, outside London. Among his illustrations for 'highbrow' novels, McKnight Kauffer's stencil designs for Arnold Bennett's Elsie and the child, 1929, are distinguished by the absence of any key-stencil to carry the drawing. It depends instead on several stencils of equal value, through which brilliant colour has been freely brushed and stippled.

As a counterpoint to the private press emphasis on limitation of the edition, two series of fine-book publications appeared, which though differing in scope and intention nevertheless disseminated the principles of good design and illustration. The first of these was called the Ariel poems, published by Faber in the late 1920s. Little more than a pamphlet, each Ariel poem was illustrated by an artist. McKnight Kauffer, for instance, illustrated two poems by T.S. Eliot for the series. As one of the directors of Faber, T.S. Eliot was in a position to engage artists to work with particular poets. Among the artists commissioned to provide the cover and frontispiece for a particular Ariel poem were Barnett Freedman, Paul Nash and Blair Hughes-Stanton. These delicate little illustrated poems served to introduce a range of contemporary poets and artists to a wider public.

The King Penguin series was established in 1939, initially under the editorship of Elizabeth Senior and then from 1943 under that of the art historian Nikolaus Pevsner. The books were intended as popular pictorial introductions to a host of subjects, each one often written by a leading specialist in the particular field. A book on Poisonous fungi, for example, was commissioned from John Ramsbottom, then Keeper of Botany at the British Museum (Natural History). Others appeared on such diverse topics as British birds, fish, flowers, shells and seashore life, all of which were illustrated with colour plates, while the front covers were specially designed for each volume. The King Penguin series was enormously popular during and immediately after the second world war, and eventually ran to seventy-six volumes before it came to an end in 1959.

By the outbreak of the second world war, the highpoint of British book illustration had been reached: the cost of labour and materials made these projects very difficult to realise. The impressive book design and fine printing of the great private presses set an example which continues to inspire small, limited-edition presses in Britain, North America and Australia to this day.

Stephen Coppel