789. The Goat Replaces the French Lilies

One of the later, prestigious commissions Charles Ricketts received as a book artist was the design for the binding of the hundred deluxe copies of The Legion Book, which was published in 1929. (See blog 12, 'The Legion Book', 5 October 2011).

The assignment was not entirely unrestricted; for example, the format had already been decided, but the purpose of the publication also influenced the design. The book helped to raise funds for the Royal British Legion, of which Edward, Prince of Wales, acted as a patron - the special edition was not for sale, but held in the gift of the prince.

The client wanted the Legion’s mascot to be featured on the front of the binding, which meant that Ricketts had to adapt the design. The artist had not thought of using that mascot – a goat chosen from the royal herd. 

Charles Ricketts, image of the British Legion mascot 

Ricketts had apparently assumed that a reference to the prince would be appropriate and originally drew a crown and the fleur-de-lis, three French lilies. The sketch of that earlier design is kept in the British Museum’s collection: a drawing in pen and ink with graphite, touched with white bodycolour, on tracing paper, 34,7 x 24,5 cm. The design is slightly larger than the image on the book's cover: 33 x 23,5 cm.

Charles Ricketts, design for the binding of The Legion Book, c. 1929
[British Museum 1962,0809.1.30]
(© The Trustees of the British Museum. Shared under a
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) licence)

The drawing was given to the museum in 1962 by Riette Sturge Moore (1907-1995), theatre designer, teacher, and interior decorator, daughter of Ricketts's friend Thomas Sturge Moore.

We can see that Ricketts removed the crown and lilies from the dotted circle and inserted a somewhat maliciously looking goat, which, whilst certainly representing a goat’s head, also seems to bear a resemblance to the ‘Cheshire Cat’.

788. Numerals in Vale Press books

David Chambers, whose books were sold earlier this year, owned a copy of the Vale Press edition of Hand and Soul by D.G. Rossetti published in 1899. It was one of those works that, remarkably, were hugely popular at the end of the nineteenth century (just like E.B. Browning’s Sonnets from the Portuguese). Ricketts’s admiration for Rossetti must have been the reason for yet another edition.

A peculiar typographical error was made in the page numbering, which was noted by the artists and collector Rainforth Armitage Walker, whose copy was part of the Chambers collection. We see his pencilled note on the first free end leaf: 'D.J.C. | 222.54'.

On the same page, Walker had made an ink inscription:

Early copy before error
in Page 39 was discovered

    p. "36" instead of

    p. 39 inversion of 

      figure.

Note by R.A. Walker in D.G. Rossetti, Hand and Soul (Vale Press, 1899)

Walker was not entirely correct. It is true that page 39 is apparently numbered ‘36’ (because the 9 is upside down), but this was not corrected during printing. The later copies printed on vellum also contain the same typographical error. There are therefore no ‘early’ and ‘later’ copies – they all suffer from the same oversight.

However, the mistake was made with a certain consistency, as there is also something peculiar about the facing page number - 38: the 8 is also placed upside down. The upper loop is slightly larger than the lower one, whereas in the design of the number 8 it is always the other way round (if there is any difference at all).

Page numbers 38 and 39 in 

D.G. Rossetti, Hand and Soul (Vale Press, 1899)

Ricketts did not design any numerals for his three typefaces. Nor did Lucien Pissarro for his ‘Brook’ typeface from the Eragny Press. However, William Morris – whom both had taken as their inspiration – had done so for his Kelmscott Press publications. The Doves Press also had its own set of numerals.

Ricketts resorted to a typeface he had used in the so-called ‘Pre-Vale’ editions: Caslon – that is to say, one of the many versions of Caslon. The font is larger than that used in Hero and Leander (1894), for example. It corresponds to that used in the 1893 edition of Daphnis and Chloe.

Some page numbers in 

D.G. Rossetti, Hand and Soul (Vale Press, 1899)

For an artist who strove for unity in book design, it remains strange that Ricketts did not take the trouble or invest the money in creating his own set of numerals.

787. Collected Works in Dust-Jackets

On 13 February 1908, Methuen and Co in London published the first six volumes of what came to be known as the 'First Collected Edition' of the works of Oscar Wilde (which was not truly the first one). The first six volumes were:

The Duchess of Padua. A Play
Salomé. A Florentine tragedy. Vera 

Lady Windermere’s Fan. A Play About a Good Woman

A Woman Of No Importance. A Play

An Ideal Husband. A play

The Importance Of Being Earnest. A Trivial Comedy for Serious People

Of each volume one thousand copies were published on handmade paper (bound in buckram)  and eighty copies on deluxe paper called 'Japanese vellum' (bound in vellum). Decorated with gilt designs by Charles Ricketts, the bindings were issued in protective grey-green dust-jackets, printed in green (some copies have brown paper wrappers, not noted by Wilde's bibliographer Stuart Mason [C.S. Millard]). 

Occasionally, sets of the standard or deluxe edition appear in their original jackets, but they are quite rare, especially in good condition. Their colour also makes them difficult to reproduce: I’ve seen both grey and blue copies, but in reality they are all actually a dark grey-green.

Dust-jacket for Oscar Wilde, Intentions and The Soul of Man (1908)

Five more volumes were published a month later, including Intentions and The Soul of Man, followed by Charles Carrington's edition of The Picture of Dorian Gray (April) and Methuen's last volumes Reviews and Miscellanies (both October 1908). 

Ricketts's designs were first used three years earlier for the deluxe editions of Oscar Wilde's De Profundis.