Last week I wrote that no Vale Press books could be found in Scandinavian libraries, but that was not quite true. While there are no complete collections, a single collecting couple has donated eight books published by the firm of Hacon & Ricketts to the University Library of Gothenburg (Göteborg). These eight books bear the bookplate of Waldemar and Beda Zachrisson.
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| Bookplate of Wald & Beda Zachrisson |
Wald or Peter Anders Waldemar Zachrisson (1861-1924) chose the printing trade and during several years was apprenticed to or worked for printers in Vienna, Berlin, Leipzig, Hamburg and St Petersburg. Influenced by the ideas of William Morris, Zachrisson set out to reform Swedish typography, (co)founding the Swedish Typographic Association in 1893, founding a printing museum and a printing school and publishing a typography yearbook, Boktryckeri-Kalender (1892-1921).
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| Boktryckeri-Kalender 1902-1903 |
The yearbook showed pictures of the modern equipment available in his own print shop, some of which could apparently be operated by the youngest clerk. In 1908, he employed 200 people, including lithographers and bookbinders.
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| Advertisement in Boktryckeri-Kalender 1902-1903 |
His wife, Beda Zachrisson (born Carlberg in 1867), outlived him by more than 20 years, and died in 1944. Not all their books ended up in Gothenburg University Library. For example, Sotheby's once sold an incunabulum, Historia romana (Venice: Erhard Ratdolt, Bernhard Maler and Peter Löslein, 1477), part 2 of which had the couple's bookplate.
The collection in Gothenburg is a carefully chosen selection of books that illustrated the example of the Printing Revival from the time of William Morris. The collection of 99 volumes includes editions from the Kelmscott Press, Doves Press, Ashendene Press, Eragny Press, Vale Press and other presses from 1890 to 1920. [Read more about Waldemar Zachrisson prints collection and about the contents of the collection.]
There are twenty books printed at the Kelmscott Press (including A Note by William Morris on his Aims in Founding the Kelmscott Press) [Gothenburg also owns a copy of the Chaucer edition], five books from the Doves Press (including The Ideal book or Book Beautiful) and eight from the Vale Press.
Zachrisson owned copies of the following Vale Press books:Milton's Early Poems (1896),
It is impossible to say what drove Zachrisson to select these eight titles, other than that he wanted to collect some examples of the Vale Press. It seems he tried to buy at least the theoretical texts about printing from most of the private presses (in this case, only the bibliography with Ricketts's important introduction is missing). He was clearly not concerned with English literary texts or Ricketts's illustrations.
In an article in his own yearbook, Zachrisson wrote a paragraph about the Vale Press (see for a digital copy Internet Archive):
Next to the Kelmscott books, I would like to put in time sequence, if not in rank, the works from 'The Vale press', a printing house of half private character, founded in 1887 by the artists Charles Ricketts and Charles Shannon. One of the Vale books was featured in the Boktryckerikalendern 1898-99, namely 'The Revival of Printing'. However, as the Vale books are particularly distinguished for their wood-engravings and are otherwise interesting, we reproduce here two of them, one of them is Poetical Sketches by William Blake, printed in Vale type with woodcuts by Charles Ricketts by the Ballantyne Press and the other is Les Ballades de Maistre Francois Villon. The latter book, published in 226 copies, is provided with woodcuts, initials and borders drawn and cut by Lucien and Ester Pissaro and printed in Vale type by the Eragny Press, an affiliate of the Vale press. (Wald. Zachrisson, ‘Tankar om bokutstyrsel, III’, in: Boktryckeri-Kalender 1902-1903. Göteborg: Zachrisson, 1903, p. 105-[129].)
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| Images of a Vale Press and an Eragny Press book in Boktryckeri-Kalender 1902-1903 |
Earlier, in the 1898-99 edition of his yearbook, Zachrisson had published images of the Vale Press edition of A Defence of the Revival of Printing (probably his own copy) and of the pre-Vale edition of Hero and Leander (1894), but it is not clear whether he owned a copy of this book. This edition of the Boktryckeri-Kalender opened with an illustrated article about William Morris and the Kelmscott Press.
[Thanks are due to Marja Smolenaars, who sent me a link to Libris, the Swedish catalogue, and to Stefan Benjaminsson, Humanistiska biblioteket, Göteborgs universitetsbibliotek, for answering a query.]
