Affordable Gems (2)

I thought I'd start a new thread because all of the pictures were making the previous Affordable Gems cumbersome, and I have some new pictures to share.

The first is Peronnik the Fool, designed by Bruce Rogers and printed by William Rudge. The second is a collection of poems printed by Harold Berliner in Nevada City. The Berliner volume is on delightfully heavy Barcham Green paper from England. I generally am attracted to illustrated volumes, but I really liked the design of both of these.

Perhaps "gem" is too strong a word for this book. Yet I feel that it deserves attention.

The artist describes why reproducing oil paintings is appropriate for this book: To match Hardy's verbal nuances with those achievable in painting was a great challenge to me, for it seemed to me that one would have to consider inferences rather than realities. And so to capture the Hardy mood and to reflect its evocative impressions, "broken color" appeared to be the most appropriate technique with which to depict his fateful, mist-enshrouded characters.

>1 aaronpepperdine:. Maybe it is not entirely appropriate in this thread, but I thought that you might be interested in seeing my Peronnik with hand-coloured woodcuts. It was printed by Poeschel & Trepte, who also printed the LEC Moliére.

>3 parchment-:

Fabulous! When I was studying Parzival I read a mention of this Grail story, and tried to find a copy in English with no success (Souvestre sounds like a very interesting author, sort of a precursor to Jules Verne, but he seems neglected by the English and Americans). My German is a little rusty, but it may suffice to read this edition, which, if I could afford it I'd love to get. Are those illustrations hand-colored?

Yes, they are hand-coloured. This little book is not so expensive. I just observed a copy at about 60 euros here: http://www.zvab.com/advancedSearch.do?title=%22Peronnik+der+Einf%E4ltige.+Origin...

My German has also been rusty. I studied the language for six years in school, but then didn't use it for decades. However, it didn't take as much effort as I had imagined to pick it up again, and I find it enjoyable and relaxing to read literature in a language that I don't use everyday.

I prefer to read scriptures in German, ie I have no problem to read the Old Testament in Swedish or English, but I find it difficult to read the New Testament as well as books such as The Imitation of Christ in those languages because I have heard the name Jesus pronounced so many times by preachers such as Mike Murdoch and Benny Hinn, and somehow they show up in my minds eye whenever I try.

Here is something interesting I just ran across. "A Plurality of Worlds," printed at the Nonesuch Press in 1929. I think it was around $30.

Wow! A Nonesuch Press edition! I have been looking for one for awhile, but the market is pretty sparse here in the states. Thanks so much for sharing.

My most recent purchase. Cost me $15. I was not quite sure about the illustrations, but once I got it I simply loved it. There is an illustration on every other page. Literally!

I have this and it is wonderful. But $15 is a steal, even for the normally bargain-priced imprint society. Where did you find it?

9) It was on eBay. Perhaps the seller did not know that he could have asked a little higher.

Well done. It is probably my favorite of the Imprint Society productions.

>8 BuzzBuzzard: A nice book at a great price. It's one of my most expensive Imprint volumes at $25 for a fine copy. The quality is every bit as good as the LEC.

>11 aaronpepperdine: Also one of my Imprint favorites after The Wood and the Graver and Benito Cereno.

>12 kdweber: You must have paid more than $25 for the Wood and The Graver!

>13 BuzzBuzzard: "One of my most expensive" - The Wood and the Graver was obviously the most expensive (by a lot) but Benito Cereno and King Solomon's Mines tie for number two.

8-14: That is a nice looking book. However, it does not look letterpress. Is it?

>15 astropi:

It is letterpress, seems to be hand colored too.

I pay a lot more then $15 to get it.

>15 astropi: I can't tell if this one is letterpress but some IS books are. For example The Labors of Hercules.

For those of us who enjoy woodcuts.

Who published that?? It looks fantastic.

>19 aaronpepperdine:

>18 BuzzBuzzard: Beautiful! Thanks for sharing.

I have a few more non-LEC books to share.

First, the Book Club of California Mother of Felipe. This can easily be had for less than $20.













Next, the Vale Press Shakespeare King John. The paper in the Vale Press Shakespeare volumes is particularly wonderful, and if you are patient, you can have them for $40 or so each.











Folk Tales and Fairy Stories from India. Designed at the Golden Cockerel Press and printed at the Chiswick Press. $50 ish.











And my favorite recent non-LEC acquisition, the Grabhorn Press Othello. The illustrations were printed from zinc, wood, and linoleum blocks. You can see on the closeups of the illustrations that they used at least three pulls to get all the color down.

The Grabhorn Shakespeare plays are particularly nice, though they seem to have not held up very well over time, and the ones in Near Fine or better condition have not seemed very affordable to me.

Incidentally, the artist for most of these was Mary Grabhorn--I'm not sure of her relationship to Edwin or Robert.

> 22
Wow, all of those are amazing. Thanks for sharing.

>23 Django6924:
Daughter of Edwin. She was a highly-regarded illustrator, working with wood- and lino-cuts. At the time of her father's death in 1968 she was living in London England.
Both her mother Marjorie and her aunt Jane, wife of Edwin's brother Robert, were involved in the Press. Marjorie often assisted in preparing books for binding while the more active Jane supervised the binding as well as reading proofs, folding printed sheets, chasing debtors, conducting the office correspondence and writing introductions to some of the books.
If all that weren't enough, in 1937 Jane also thought up The Jumbo Press, which "gently ridiculed typographical pomposity', and the following year co-founded the Colt Press, which she ran until 1943 when it was absorbed into the Grabhorn Press. Among its authors were Edmund Wilson and Henry Miller.

Sources:
Encyclopedia of Library and Information Science: Volume 10 (1973)
New York Times 18 December 1968.

>23 Django6924:

Django, your observation about the fragility highlights what is to me yet another amazing aspect of George Macy's work: durability. With the exception of the sheepskin bindings, most of the LECs I have seem to have held up impressively well.

It is rare to see, even on eBay, LECs with disintegrating bindings. This is in stark contrast to other printers of the era - John Henry Nash, for example, produced some stunning work, but had an unfortunate habit of binding his books in parchment. Or if you manage to find a Fine copy of the quite wonderful Grabhorn Press Relation of Alvar Nunez (hand colored and illuminated by Valenti Angelo!), you will probably be so fearful of damaging the transparently thin vellum that you will hardly enjoy reading the volume.

>25 featherwate:

Thanks for the bio! The Grabhorns were an amazing family. If anyone is interested further in their work, the California bookseller David Magee printed a partial bibliography of sorts, titled "A Catalogue Of Some Five Hundred Examples Of The Printing Of Edwin And Robert Grabhorn 1917-1960." It can be had for under $15 and is prefaced by a fascinating essay on the brothers Grabhorn. Apparently one of them tried to set up shop up here in Seattle before relocating to the Bay Area. I guess my ancestors weren't sufficiently cultured to appreciate his work.

22, >26 aaronpepperdine:
I love that Grabhorn Othello! The printing of the Shakespeare illustrations came up in an interview Edwin G. gave towards the end of his life:
Teiser (interviewer): The Shakespeare illustrations were {taken} from... ?
Grabhorn: Woodblocks.
Teiser: How many colors in most of them?
Grabhorn: I don't know. They were printed on that hand-press there {points to it}. Mary and I did them together on Saturdays and Sundays.
Teiser: The problem of registration must be great in that sort of work.
Grabhorn: Not too great.
The interview is one of several carried out by the Regional Oral History Office of UCal in the 1960s/70s, in which survivors of the great era of California's private presses looked back on their own careers or reminisced (not always kindly) about the careers of others. They were a rugged, humorous and sometimes unforgiving bunch: Edwin Grabhorn on George Macy is not for the faint-hearted, nor does he subscribe to the general view that Valenti Angelo was a saint in human form:
"...We had had a fellow working with us by the name of Valenti Angelo. He always was hasty in making pictures when we were printing a new book. They may look good as pictures, but they didn't fit the text."*
He also suggests that his staff didn't do a terribly good job on Edward A Wilson's illustrations for the 1930 Robinson Crusoe which the Grabhorn Press printed for the LEC (a collaboration that soured rapidly):
"They were colored. I had a boy working for me who did a sloppy job. He never was very exacting.
"This boy is dead now..."
*For example, Angelo illustrated the Grabhorn Book of Job with a large naked Job - large, naked and uncircumcised, as a Jewish reader was quick to point out.

Edwin talks entertainingly about his time in Seattle, too!

Thanks for the pointer to David Magee. He seems to have been closely involved with the Grabhorns on several projects over a long period. One early (1940) bibliography is on ABE at over $6,250 !

featherwate, those interviews are most amusing reading! As you say, and as I quoted from somewhere else in this forum, he had a hearty dislike of Macy which was reciprocated by the Founder, though publicly Macy never called Grabhorn an outright liar, as Edwin called Macy. Basically, it seems Edwin Grabhorn pretty much saw anyone who didn't do things the way Grabhorn wanted them as incompetent and/or dishonest.

Macy's comments on the LEC Treasure Island are pretty much right on target. It is a beautifully designed book, but one not made to hold up well over the years (as aaronpepperdine has remarked). The limp binding in sea green is attractive, but prone to becoming dog-eared (I have had Dover paperbacks with stiffer boards!), and the paper has a beautifully tactile texture, but insufficiently opaque to prevent the printing on the other side from showing through.

I looked for years to find a Mint Copy and finally settled for one that I might call Near Fine+; the book seems unread and would therefore be Fine except for a very faint sunfading of the spine. Still, I rejected at least 15 other copies before I found his one. Most had Very Good or better interiors, but the bindings were in sad condition. leccol's rebinding job of his copy is the way the Grabhorns should have done it in the first place.

>27 featherwate:, 28

It is interesting that she says woodblocks, because the colophon lists zinc and linoleum as well. And those interviews are wonderful.

There is another anecdote in the essay that I enjoyed: Apparently, whichever of the brothers was in charge of the press employees was somewhat conflict averse. On a couple of occasions it was necessary for him to fire someone, and not wanting to hurt feelings, he accomplished this by bringing in a bottle of cheap liquor, getting drunk with the staff, and telling everyone that the press had gone bankrupt and would be closing up for good. Everyone but the unwanted employee, of course, returned the next day.

On the subject of David Magee, I haven't been able to find out that much about him, but he apparently ran a large bookstore in California for some time, and was associated with bay area printers. He also dabbled in the book arts - I believe he designed the Book Club of California's bibliography of their first 100 books.

On a final note, given when Job is thought to have been written, isn't it fairly likely that Job would not have been, ahem, shall we say, of the Tribe of David?

>29 aaronpepperdine:
So Job was a Gentile or pre-Abrahamic? Not having read his Book for at least 60 years (or perhaps never) I looked for him and the history of circumcision in Wikipedia and the Jewish Encyclopedia. I'm now more confused about him than I was before, and as for the other...when my eye caught a link to "New guidelines on oral-suction circumcision", I decided there are some things that should be pursued only on a need-to-know basis.

Anyway. here is Valenti Angelo's portrait of the man himself. Although it's a large picture (it's a folio book apparently) you have to look quite hard to find his point at issue. Must have been a cold day.



I think it's a delightful and striking piece of art.

Is that a picture of Django? (Just kidding.)

I have had my eyes on Mary Shelley's Frankenstein illustrated by Lynd Ward for quite some time. The first printing however was (and still is) way out of my price range. Then a few weeks ago I came across this edition ($4) at my local Library used book store. This was published in 1986 by New Orchard Editions Ltd and was printed in Great Britain by Bath Press, Avon. Neither the publisher nor the printing house is known to me. Reading from the dust jacket: This special re-presentation of the original work contains sixty wood engraved illustrations, superb visual reference for Mary Shelley's vivid text. It is dedicated to the memory of Lynd Ward who passed away in 1985. I imagine and hope that all of the original illustrations were used here.

The paper is nice and thick. The yellowing of the pages that has bothered me on other occasions (notably the first HP Gulliver Travels) does not bother me here. I think it just adds an antique flavor to the whole production which I find appropriate. What puzzles me are the vertical lines on some of the pages (only on one side of the page). I am guessing it has to do with the composition of the paper but I have not experienced this elsewhere. The binding is plain and bright orange. This will be a great candidate for rebinding once I start this project.

Very happy with this gem!

P.S This led me to purchasing Ward's LEC The Innocent Voyage in stated like new condition for $40 including shipping.

>32 BuzzBuzzard: Nice deal! I too have been looking for a copy of Frankenstein illustrated by Lynd Ward. Last week I finally bought the edition put out by Centipede Press. Definitely not an affordable gem but a beautiful copy. A great example of Ward's work and one that works perfectly with the text. A must for any Ward fan.

Terrific find!
New Orchard Editions is (or I think possibly now was) a Dorset-based publisher with a strangely varied list ranging from cheap pocket guides on hill-walking in Yorkshire to heavyweight tomes on heraldry. The Bath Press, Avon, is now a pretty large commercial book printing operation with over 400 employees.
Given that both companies are/were based in the English Westcountry (about 90 mins driving time apart) and that Bath is very close to the Wookey Hole Paper Mill (about 45 minutes away), I wonder if the latter provided the paper? It specializes in hand-made paper, and modern laid paper is characterized by thin vertical lines. (I think there's at least one LEC that used paper from Wookey Hole.)
Harold Bloom quotes from a note to the New Orchard Editions in his own edition of Frankenstein (ca 1994).
The book was distributed in the US by Sterling Publishing Company, but who exactly commissioned this particular edition as a tribute to Lynd Ward isn't clear (unless of course it's made clear in the book itself!).
PS You'll like The Innocent Voyage as a book even if you don't like the story - it's a fine production.

>33 kdweber:

Is Centipede Press publishing limited editions or they operate like The Folio Society? Their Frankenstein looks beautiful but pricy.

>34 featherwate:

Thank you for the most interesting information! There is neither mention of where the paper came from nor who commissioned the edition.

>35 BuzzBuzzard: Limited edition (300 copies).

Here is a closer look at the Centipede edition:
http://booksandvines.com/2011/09/07/frankenstein-centipede-press-limited-edition...

>36 kdweber: >37 busywine:

The Centipede Press Frankenstein looks great! Is there a reference for the number of illustrations that were used? It claims it has all of the original but how many were they? The featured edition in my previous post has sixty.

P.S. Strange that the Centipede website states 300 LE and the book colophon reads 500 LE.

38: I will concur that the Centipede Press Frankenstein is the edition to get! While not letterpress, it's format is large (not too large though) and beautiful. This is the the way the Lynd Ward illustrations were meant to be seen. In terms of the limitation number, I believe originally CP planned on having 500 copies produced, but dropped it down to 300 when it did not sell as expected. Also, some of the earlier editions are numbered, while most are not.

I listed this one under Affordable Gems because I got it for $18. However typically it runs a little higher.

It came with the announcement card, a new chemise but no slipcase. Perhaps the latter was removed recently because the book is really well preserved. Illustrated, decorated but sadly not illuminated by Valenti Angelo, other than the title spread.

The same seller had Vathek listed for $20. I bought it but then received an email that there was black tape on the board. I immediately requested a refund and got it. Yet something was bothering me, because though the pictures were not great there was no visible tape. Turns out the tape was on the chemise. So I was waiting for the book to be re listed but someone grabbed it before me! The is the second LEC that gets away under my nose. I could not get a rest until I found a copy for $20 in comparable condition to the one that I missed. It will arrive tomorrow.

For the likes of me who cannot afford the LEC Robert Frost, the Imprint Society version (1971) seems to be a nice substitute.

I am certainly not one who thinks that poetry should not be illustrated! Alas we did not get illustrations with this edition. Neither decorations... Still two handy volumes, printed letterpress on a pleasing though far from being orgasmically luxurious paper.

P.S. Apparently it is very important to know who supplied the dies for Frost's relief portrait.

>41 BuzzBuzzard:

A beautiful edition, vdanchev, thanks for bringing it to our attention (I likewise will probably never be able to afford the LEC Frost).

Another example of the stunning value of Imprint Society volumes. I finally found Riddle of the Sands with the leather in good shape, and it is also a lovely production.

>8 BuzzBuzzard:
>11 aaronpepperdine:
>12 kdweber:
>15 astropi:
So, er, nine years later I can’t work out which book is being discussed above, could anyone clue me in, please?

>44 GusLogan: Unless the original posters respond, I would guess Imprint Society (>9 aaronpepperdine: >11 aaronpepperdine: >12 kdweber:) and King Solomon's Mines (>14 kdweber:).

>45 mr.philistine:
Thank you, yes, re-reading the posts that does look right!

>46 GusLogan: I forgot to add that >16 kafkachen: also mentions letterpress and hand colouring - both of which you might want to confirm from wcarter's review of this title on the FPF here: https://www.librarything.com/topic/339881
I feel I can make out the text impressions in every photo of a printed page but most especially on the 'Contents' page (image no. 12).