Waltham Saint Lawrence in Berkshire: Golden Cockerel Press, 1931, small folio, original publisher’s half white pigskin gilt over maize cloth boards by Sangorski & Sutcliffe, gilt spine with raised bands, top edge gilt, others uncut. (ii), 268, (6) pages.
Limited to 500 numbered copies of which this is one of the 488 copies printed on handmade paper (Chanticleer 78; Gill 285; A Century for a Century 26). Lacking the slipcase. Small bookseller’s ticket from Myers & Co. on front pastedown. Three bookplates on the front pastedown: 1) Louis W. Black, 2) Albert M. Ramsay-Cohn & Constance, His Wife, and his accompanying 3) Downsland Court, Ditchling, Sussex bookplate. Maize cloth-covered boards show some usual foxing (moderate foxing on the rear board, very minor foxing on the front board). Only the slightest hint of soiling to the pigskin leather tips, else a near fine copy, and scarce in this condition.
With 64 wood-engraved initial letters and illustrations by Eric Gill and printed by Robert and Moira Gibbings in Golden Cockerel type (designed for the press by Eric Gill) on Batchelor handmade paper with special watermark of a dove and the initials G.C.P. “Conceived in the fruitful mind of Robert Gibbings, this is the Golden Cockerel book usually compared with the Doves Bible and the Kelmscott Chaucer. A flower among the best products of English romantic genius, it is also surely, thanks to its illustrator, Eric Gill, the book among all books in which Roman type has been best mated with any kind of illustration” (Chanticleer). Eric Gill’s biographer, Fiona MacCarthy, describes The Four Gospels as “the culmination of (Gill’s) work for the Golden Cockerel Press and … the example which experts and collectors … have always viewed as the height of his achievement. To describe it as a series of engraved initial letters for the Bible text, though strictly correct, gives little idea of the richness and complexity of Gill’s own contribution. The decorative letters do not just embellish the text, they play upon it and develop it, to the point at which distinctions are blurred.” (Eric Gill: A Lover’s Quest for Art and God, pp.243-234).
Offered by Oak Knoll Books
$14,500.00
To purchase, contact: orders@oakknoll.com
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