791. A First Review of The Collected Letters

Almost a week ago, I received the latest issue of The Book Collector, volume 75, no. 3, Autumn 2026. The magazine contains a review of The Collected Letters of Charles Ricketts written by Simon Cook who has published widely about Victorian and modern book art. (See the website of The Book Collector here).

Cover of The Book Collector, Autumn 2026

I usually start at the end of an issue (heading for the ‘News and Notes’ section) and came across the review straight away, as it rounds off this issue (pages 566-569).  

It is encouraging to read that the publication of the letters by Brill, a division of De Gruyter Brill, is regarded as 'extremely useful', 'opening up a range of information that sheds new light on a significant figure', and, as Cooke argues, for some information 'we are privileged to take it from the artist's own mouth'. His conclusion about the publication is: 'Invaluable for the specialist and a cornerstone in all future research, it will also appeal to anyone with an interest in art, the art of the book and publishing.'

Among other things, Cooke discusses the warmth with which Ricketts addresses his correspondents, and, alongside his generous personality, the letters also reveal more about his ‘critical thinking’, for example following his reading of Conrad. Indeed, Ricketts was an avid reader whose interests were wide and up to date, including French and German literature.

Speaking about Ricketts’s book designs, Cooke says: 'Once again, the innovator is revealed to be a traditionalist as much as a creator of a modern style'.

(For those who read every publication, including The Book Collector, with a correction pencil: on page 567, replace ‘Douglas’ with ‘Sydney’, and on page 568, replace ‘1,398’ with ‘2,147’.)

I would like to remind the reader that four letters not included in this edition (because the editors only discovered them later) were published to celebrate the publication of The Collected Letters of Charles Ricketts. A few copies of these are still available at the original price; see blog 776 'Published: Four Fugitive Letters'. These are letters written by Ricketts to Cecil French, Martin Birnbaum, Helen Travers Smith & Isabelle Augusta Gregory.

790. Charles Ricketts & Harry Graf Kessler

Harry Graf Kessler (1868-1937) and Charles Ricketts met a few times, but Ricketts did not particularly like him. Kessler was a German publisher, author, diplomat and art collector whose Cranach Press is considered to be the most elegant and important private press in Germany. His edition of Shakespeare’s Hamlet (1929), with wood engravings by Gordon Craig, is regarded in particular as a modern highlight in the art of book design.

Harry Graf Kessler in 1889
Photo by Leonard Berlin (1841–1931)
[Deutsches Literaturarchiv Marbach, Nachlass Harry Graf Kessler]

Shortly after the turn of the century, in 1904, Ricketts wrote in his diary that he had heard from the philosopher Hermann Keyserling that Kessler was quite well known in Germany and ‘immensely rich’. Ricketts was surprised by this: ‘this I had never imagined’ (Diary, 6 May 1904).

During a visit to Berlin in August 1903, Ricketts ran into Kessler – whom he must have met previously, probably in October 1897 – on several occasions at the Berlin Gemäldegalerie. In a letter to Charles Shannon, he makes his discomfort about these meetings clear:

I have bumped against Kessler some 3 times I find that cutting him or being cut by him is undermining my health. He dresses in quite a slatternly way which is nice of him, he is very voluble and eager much more than I am, next to him I am a Piero della Francesca figure.

(The Collected Letters of Charles Ricketts, vol. I, p. 217, letter 227).

A year later Ricketts and Kessler corresponded about Maxim Gorki who was arrested during the first Russian Revolution.

In January 1912, Kessler and Ricketts were among the guests of a supper to honour the stage-director Max Reinhardt, and in a letter to a friend Ricketts wrote:

[...] Count Kessler was there also, I am glad to say he is quite bald.

He underlined the last word to emphasise his delight.

(The Collected Letters of Charles Ricketts, vol. II, p. 778, letter 736).

Finally, in a letter to the poet and playwright Gordon Bottomley from March 1915, Ricketts wrote about the rehearsal of the London performance of Richard Strauss' opera The Knight of the Rose (Der Rosenkavalier):

Count Kessler who first thought of the plot before a picture of Veronese, is an old personal dislike and enemy of ours in Germany.

(The Collected Letters of Charles Ricketts, vol. II, p. 966, letter 905).

In this letter, the animosity is linked to Kessler's support for Post-Impressionism. The elephant in the room.

Kessler himself may well have felt differently, although his diaries reveal no evidence of either antipathy or sympathy. He did mention both Ricketts and Shannon in a relatively short list of English painters whose work appealed to him, when he gave an interview to the Daily Mail:

You have, besides, some most remarkable artists, who are perhaps thought too little of in your own country – men like Wilson Steer, Charles Shannon, Ricketts, Condor, Rothenstein, and young artists of great promise like John Gordon Craig and Wells. […] Even in painting, the brushwork of men like Whistler or Charles Shannon has hardly any rival in our day for its grace and charm.

('German View of Our Art. "Conceived by Gentlemen for Gentlemen." How it is Unique', in Daily Mail, 4 August 1904, p. 2)

Harry Graf Kessler in 1924
Photo: Chevallier Georges
[Musée Albert-Kahn]
[Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license]

In 1897, Kessler had travelled to London to meet Ricketts. It is not entirely certain whether that meeting actually took place. The reason for his visit was his admiration for Ricketts’s early editions: Daphnis and Chloe (1893) and Hero and Leander (1894). 

Kessler had been working for some time on a new edition of Friedrich Nietzsche’s Also sprach Zarathustra (Thus Spoke Zarathustra), which finally appeared in 1908. At first he wanted Ricketts to design the book, then he approached Georges Lemmen who designed a new typeface for the book, and, in the end, Henry van der Velde was responsible for the graphic design.

Both Belgian artists had received samples of the two early Ricketts and Shannon books, as Kessler wanted them to be inspired by the Caslon type that was used. 

By 1897, Ricketts had of course designed his own typeface, the Vale, and published the first books of the Vale Press, but Kessler did not use these as examples for his Nietzsche edition. However, he imitated the Caslon books for a few exhibition catalogues and, remarkably, a 1905 exhibition in Weimar had on display more works from Ricketts and the Vale Press than from the Kelmscott Press, the Eragny Press and the Doves Press: Ausstellung von Werken der Modernen Druck und Schreib Kunst April-Mai 1905. The exhibition was held in April and May 1905 in the Grossherzogliches Museum für Kunst und Kunstgewerbe in Weimar.

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.