691 Ricketts & Shannon Discount

Last Saturday, the book website Biblio sent out an advertisement. Until next Sunday, books can be purchased at a discount under the code word Oscar Wilde. 

Biblio.com mail, 26 October 2024

The site gives this kind of discount - as an incentive to purchase used and rare books from antiquarian booksellers - with some regularity. [For the website see Biblio.com.] I usually ignore such messages but this one caught my attention. 

Biblio.com mail, 26 October 2024

The discount code was illustrated with an image from one of Oscar Wilde's fairy tale collections, A House of Pomegranates, with illustrations by Charles Ricketts and Charles Shannon, or, as the artists put it on the title page:

THE DESIGN & DECORATION OF THIS BOOK BY C. RICKETTS & C.H. SHANNON

Via Biblio.com, two copies of this first edition are now on sale, one for $731.30 ('partially unopened [...] Covers a bit darkened, corners rubbed, hinges weakened with paper cracked, endpapers slightly darkened, engraved bookplate on the front pastedown with the monogram engraved on the plate of R.E 1899, otherwise interior clean and bright') and one for $3,150.00 ('Very good plus to near fine', 'a beautiful copy', 'Housed in cloth-backed marbled paper custom box. Small bookplate on front pastedown. Hinges neatly repaired. Only light soiling to board edges, with a bit of toning to spine. Text block free from foxing').

So the 10% discount might amount to $73 or even $315. However, the maximum discount per order is $20, making these two copies cost $711.30 or $3,130.00 respectively.

690. Laurence Irving Meets Ricketts

In 1922, the artist, book-illustrator and (later) set-designer for films Laurence Irving came to the Keep at Chilham Castle near Canterbury, as Ricketts wrote in letter to W.B. Yeats. Irving (1897-1988) was called 'a nice sensitive youngster' who sketched peacocks in the garden. Trained at the Byam Shaw School of Art, he met Ricketts and Shannon when he continued his training at the Royal Academy School, specialising in landscape and marine painting.

He once told Ricketts's biographer that he had asked Ricketts who the best landscape-painter was, and immediately got the reply: 'Wagner'.(*)

Charles Ricketts, 'Amfortas', design for Richard Wagner's Parsifal
(Supplement to The Illustrated London News, 19 May 1928)

The BBC archives show that he had previously told that anecdote in a more extended form, as he did on the radio programme The Irving Inheritance (interviewer John Miller):

The great influence on me was Charles Ricketts and I remember one night, as a rather callow student, asking Ricketts who he thought were our greatest landscape painters and in a flash he said, 'Tennyson and Wagner!'

And he added:

To me [the poet] Masefield was, I suppose, the supreme marine painter.

(The Irving Inheritance, BBC Radio 4, Sunday 1 March 1981, 19:30 [see the BBC Genome website])

Irving had published book illustrations for a medieval play, Godefroi and Yolande, published by John Lane, The Bodley Head in 1907, and Masefield's Philip the King, issued by William Heinemann in 1927, a year before he went to Hollywood with Douglas Fairbanks to be his Art Director on The Iron Mask.

Rex Whister and Charles Ricketts,
painted by Laurence Irving (1970)

An Irving oil painting from 1970 (see the collection of V&A) depicts Charles Ricketts next to Rex Whistler in the enormous scenic studio of Alick Johnstone, supervising the realisation for Henry VIII and Victoria Regina.

Other BBC programmes related to Ricketts are: Poverty and Oysters (17 August 1979, BBC 2) and Between Ourselves (22 February 1991, BBC Radio 3).

(*) J.G. Paul Delaney, Charles Ricketts. A Biography. Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1990, pp. 214, 312.

689. Ricketts and The Woman's World

A week ago I received a copy of Articles from The Woman's World Edited by Oscar Wilde, a selection of thirty essays with introduction and notes by Eleanor Fitzsimons. Gyles Brandreth [see the website of The Oscar Wilde Society] had this to say about this impressive new book:

Eleanor Fitzsimons has exploded the myth that Oscar Wilde was a lazy editor. She shows how hard he worked to find the best writers and the best illustrators to make his magazine a beacon of progressive thought regarding women in education, the professions, politics and the arts.

Selected Articles from The Woman's World Edited by Oscar Wilde (2024)

Fitzsimons discusses Wilde's editorial episode, which began in April 1887 when he was asked to be the editor of The Lady's World, half a year before the first issue under his editorship would appear. The time was taken to change the title, lay-out, and the contents of the magazine - the emphasis was now more on what women were thinking than on what they were wearing, although fashion remained an important subject. The introduction shows how Wilde, in his literary notes, supported new and democratic ideas, and invited women with sometimes opposing views to make contributions.

The editor covers contributions from different types of sections - poetry, fiction, literature, fashion, education, industry, employment for women, politics and public life. Although most of the authors were women, the illustrators were all men. Wilde became disappointed with the publisher's lack of support for his plans, both financially and in terms of content he faced constraints, leading to him giving up.

The selection follows the format of the original magazine, the text in two columns, and illustrations (for the introduction) embedded in the text, unfortunately leading to ugly gaps in the consequently short lines of text aligned on either side (see for example page 25). The endpapers are after a design by E.W. Godwin: the original bound volumes of The Woman's World had simple blank endleaves and this busy colourful fabric design - not designed for books bur for furniture - is misplaced in this volume.

Zooming in on Charles Ricketts, we unfortunately may detect some flaws. The short biography (pp. 246-7)  states that Ricketts's mother was French, an error that has been corrected by his biographer Paul Delaney who established that she was Italian. Throughout the book we find illustrations by Ricketts that are not attributed to him and about which a somewhat hidden footnote (p. 302, note 26) comments that they may have been his work. The misconception that Wilde was the one who invited Ricketts to produce illustrations - Ricketts had previously worked for the publisher Cassell and would not meet Wilde until 1889 - is reflected in the comment that theirs was one of Wilde's 'collaborative relationships' (p. 30). Eventually they did become close collaborators but not before 1890.

Not all of Ricketts's illustrations are signed by him, especially the headpieces for the fashion section are quite often missing a monogram, leading Fitzsimons to contradict herself. On the one hand, she says he ‘might’ have made these, on the other, she claims with certainty that they are his work: 'Charles Ricketts may have been the artist responsible for the headpieces to Mrs. Johnstone's articles "The Latest Fashions" [...]' (page 302) and 'From 1889, when Charles Ricketts began drawing playful headers for "The Latest Fashions" [...]' (page 243). Apparently, these drawings have not been examined closely.

There is no reason for doubt. Ricketts designed all the headpieces from February 1889 onwards. The first one is not signed, but the second one is (March 1889).

Charles Ricketts, detail of headpiece (The Woman's World, March 1889)

The double-lined square within the wreath is a simplification of Ricketts's monogram which he used to sign a tailpiece in the same instalment.

Charles Ricketts, detail of tailpiece (The Woman's World, March 1889)

For some articles he combined the CR monogram and the simple square, see for example his illustrations for 'Boots and Shoes' in The Woman's World of May 1889. Shortly, a book about the early illustrations by Ricketts reproducing all of them will be published and announced in this series of blogs.

688. Ricketts, Lettering and Ornament in The Printing Art

In 1907, Addison B. LeBoutillier (1872-1951) - an architect, who was famous for his pottery, and also known for his drawings and etchings - published an article in The Printing Art: A Monthly Magazine of the Art of Printing and of the Allied Arts, edited by Henry Lewis Johnson and published by the University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts: 'Lettering and ornament' (volume 8, no. 6,  February 1907, pp. 385-392). [The Princeton Library copy can be found at Hathi Trust.]

Addison B. LeBoutillier

Addison B. LeBoutillier, 'Lettering and ornament'
(The Printing Art, February 1907, first page)

The article contains six examples of lettering and ornament of which one contains a quote from Charles Ricketts (p. [391]). The text comes from his polemical essay A Defence of the Revival of Printing (1899). The short passage (from pages 10 and 11) deals with the lack of decoration in early Italian printed books, William Morris's ideas about book decoration, and the use of ornamental type.

Addison B. LeBoutillier, 'Lettering and ornament'
(The Printing Art, February 1907, p. [391])

But the illustration is not a simple facsimile of the original edition. The text has been re-set from a letter not designed by Ricketts and placed in a border, with an initial T, which were neither drawn nor published by him.

The border and initial were originally designed for the Boston firm of Copeland and Day for their edition of D.G. Rossetti’s The House of Life (1894). Designed by Bertram Grosvenor Goodhue, they were later called ‘more cluttered than Morris’s ever were’.(*) They were also much heavier and denser than Ricketts's borders. Goodhue designed 3 borders and 114 initial letters for the Rossetti edition.

D.G. Rossetti, The House of Life (1894),
designed by B.G. Goodhue

The type is not designed by Ricketts nor by Goodhue - it is a copy of Morris's own Troy Type (mentioned by Ricketts in his quote), a version probably made by the American Type Founders, and called Satanick.

Why this text by Ricketts was chosen - he is not mentioned anywhere in the text (Morris, incidentally, is mentioned as an example) - and why it was set in a typeface based on Morris's and why the whole thing was placed in an ornamental border by Goodhue is a mystery. The result hardly qualifies as a typographic unit - at least not in the way Ricketts was striving for.

(*) Quote from William S. Peterson, The Kelmscott Press. A History of William Morris’s Typographical Adventure. Berkeley, California, University of California Press, 1996, p. 302.

687. Advertising for "The Pageant"

The Pageant. MDCCCXCVI, edited by Charles Hazelwood Shannon and J.W. Gleeson White, was issued by the young London firm of Henry & Co. in December 1895. Advertisements were published in several newspapers and weekly magazines, such as The Academy and The Athenaeum (30 November 1895), The Publishers' Circular (14 December 1895), and The Times (18 December 1895).

Earlier, there may have been a prospectus, as several papers quote the publisher's announcement of The Pageant. Early announcements were published in De Kroniek, a Dutch magazine (6 October 1895), Pall Mall Gazette (8 October 1895), and others.

Börsenblatt (2 November 1895)

An almost full-page advertisement in German appeared in the magazine for German bookshops and publishers, Börsenblatt für den Deutschen Buchhandel und die verwandten Geschäftszweige on 2 November 1895. [For a digital image see the website SLUB Dresden.]

The firm of Henry & Co. introduces itself as the German publisher of Richard Muther's Geschichte der Malerei (published by Henry & Co in 1895 as The History of Modern Painting) and the collected works of Nietzsche.

Next, The Pageant is promoted as a Christmas gift book and the execution is praised as 'in the best style', while the content is of supreme artistic and literary quality. A complete list of the contributions follows. About the binding it is said:

The Pageant ist gebunden in einen von C. RICKETTS, dem preciösesten Buchkünstlern, entworfenen Band.

(Translation: The Pageant is bound after a design by C. RICKETTS, the most exquisite book artist.)

Börsenblatt (2 November 1895), p. 6189.

The deluxe edition is mentioned, followed by some business announcements on discounts for pre-order or back-order.

Henry & Co report that they can quickly export English-language works to Germany (there is an ‘Export-Department’) and show interest in German works that can be translated (excluding novels).

I have not found similar ads in other foreign magazines - not even in Dutch newspapers, while some of the publishers at Henry & Co. were Dutchmen. However, J.T. Grein (one of them) wrote a long 'review' for a newspaper: '"The Pageant", een kunstwerk' (An Art Work) [Algemeen Handelsblad, 19 december 1895].