15. Rivers of disappointment

On 6 December 1889, the Publishers' Circular contained an advertisement of Cassell & Company, Limited, for The Rivers of Great Britain: Descriptive, historical, pictorial. Rivers of the East Coast. The volume, 'now ready', was part of a series of cloth bound topographical publications 'with numerous highly finished engravings'. The advertisement illustrated a view from the old bridge of Invercauld, Braemer, and the volume was said to contain 'illustrations from original drawings' by twenty-one artists, including the 23-years old Charles Ricketts.

Advertisement for Rivers of the East Coast (Publishers' circular, 6 December 1889, p. 33)

Chapters on the Tay, the Tweed, the Tyne, the Wear, etcetera, were illustrated by R. Randoll, W.H.J. Boot, R. Jobling, and other artists, but Ricketts did not contribute to the book, in spite of the advertisement. Perhaps he did not deliver a drawing, or his drawing was rejected; the realistic, topographic illustration was not his forte. It is interesting to read, though, that the publisher used his name in the advertisement, albeit it among twenty others.

Front cover of Rivers of the East Coast (1892 edition)

I have a copy of the 1892 edition, not the first 1889 edition. As Cassell's regularly published revised editions, with new illustrations by younger artists, perhaps Ricketts's drawing (or drawings) was (or were) discarded in the 1892 edition? It is now possible to check this, as many books from the period have been digitized and the Internet Archive gives access to the 1889 edition in several formats. The 1892 edition is identical to the 1889 edition, except for the advertisements at the back. Alas, Ricketts did not do a drawing for  the book about East Coast rivers.

Illustration by R. Jobling (Rivers of the East Coast, 1892, p. 169)

14. Beauty, volupté, and jewellery

'The Cult of Beauty', an exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum earlier in the year, has crossed the Channel and in an attempt to seduce the French, changed its name to 'Beauté, Morale et Volupté dans l'Angleterre d'Oscar Wilde'. The show in the Musée d'Orsay located in the heart of Paris started on 13 September and will close on 15 January 2012.

Catalogue The Cult of Beauty (2011), p. 228-229.

The new title indicates that France and England were culturally different territories in the nineteenth century. While English artists penetrated French literary and artistic circles, and French artists visited London on many occasions, the great artistic movements of the days developed separately and were connected only through individual artists, such as Oscar Wilde. This is probably why his name pops up in the French title of the exhibition, along with the French quote 'volupté' from Charles Baudelaire ('L'invitation au voyage': Là, tout n'est qu'ordre et beauté, Luxe, calme et volupté). Pre-Raphaelite ideas, the aesthetic movement and Arts and Crafts did not invade France at the time, which was totally immersed in Impressionism.

Catalogue The Cult of Beauty (2011), p. 254-255.

Several Ricketts items were included in the English version of the exhibition: a bronze sculpture, 'Silence', the bindings he designed for Oscar Wilde's The Sphinx and John Gray's Silverpoints, a copy of The Dial (no. 2, 1892), as well as the drawing 'Oedipus and the Sphinx' that was acquired by Frederic Lord Leighton and after his death bought back by Ricketts.

Not illustrated in the catalogue is a brooch that Ricketts designed for Edith Cooper's birthday in 1900, now in the collection of the Fitzwilliam Museum: 'My love has given me L'Oiseau bleu - the brooch designed by Ricketts -- Byzantine, wonderful' (Binary star. Leaves from the Journal and Letters of Michael Field, 1846-1914, 2006, p. 149). The gold brooch, enamelled and set with a garnet, was made by Carlo and Arthur Giuliano in London and depicts a bluebird on a spray of berries. Charlotte Gere and Geoffrey C. Munno wrote that 'consciously or unconsciously' Ricketts based his design on one by Burne-Jones and even followed his example in employing the Giuliano firm (Artists' Jewellery, 1989).

Brooch made by Carlo Giuliano after a design by Edward Burne-Jones (c. 1885)

The original sketches for the brooch are in an album of Ricketts's jewellery designs in the British Museum. Diana Scarisbrick stated: 'The subject derives from Roman Mediterranean art and there are four versions of it in the album. The brooch, worn so often "nestling in real lace" had to be repaired', which Edith Cooper saw as a sign that she had been faithful in wearing it. (The Apollo, September 1982). Edith Cooper and her aunt Katharine Bradley wrote jointly under the pen-name Michael Field.

There is some confusion over this piece of jewellery: Scarisbrick reported its loss (based on the diary notes of Michael Field: 'Returning home I find my Blue Bird Brooch gone', 11 April 1909, Binary star, p. 183), while the Fitzwilliam Museum describes the brooch as part of a bequest by Katharine Bradley. Darracott illustrated the brooch from the Fitzwilliam collection, dating it as 1899; Denys Sutton dated it as 1903-1906; Calloway dated it as c. 1904, and stated that this item was intended for Laurence Binyon's wife, Cicely. However, Paul Delaney wrote that the Binyon brooch was 'a version of the bluebird brooch, in white with a blue spray in its beak'. Anyway, Ricketts was so disappointed with that brooch that he did not give it to Cicely Binyon, but to his model, Hetty Deacon. There must have been at least two brooches based on the bird designs, and apparently, the Michael Field brooch was lost in 1909 but found again before Katharine Bradley died in 1914.

Between 1899 and 1904 Ricketts designed jewellery for his friends, Michael Field (Cooper and Bradley), Marie Sturge Moore, and Mrs Llewellyn Hacon, and some of these were donated to the collections of the Fitzwilliam Museum and the Ashmolean Museum, while others seem to have disappeared. As a stage designer, later in his life, Ricketts also designed jewellery to go with the dresses of actresses and actors, and these gems reached a wider audience than the private circle of his friends, although the spectators may not have been aware of the intricate details when seeing something sparkling on the stage.

Colour illustrations of the bluebird brooch can be found in Stephen Calloway's book on Charles Ricketts and in Joseph Darracott's The World of Charles Ricketts. 

From: Stephen Calloway, Charles Ricketts (1979, p. 28: sketch) and Joseph Darracott, The World of Charles Ricketts (1980, p. 65: brooch).

13. New books in Vale type

Designers of exhibition catalogues on Art Nouveau and programs for conferences about the Arts and Crafts movement seem unable to resist the temptation to use initials, types or page borders from the period. Some designers apparently think that these visual quotations help us to remember what the book is about, or possibly they think we need a form of nostalgia to lure us into buying their books. Do they really think we must love Art Nouveau to read about it?

Several publications about Ricketts in the past have included such quotes, usually too many of them, crowding the pages with designs that were not meant for these books in the first place, and frequently mixing designs by Morris, Ricketts, and others, in order to approach the atmosphere of the 1890s. And it gets worse, now that modern digital techniques have provided new attributes. It is possible to print your own book with Ricketts's types, or you can use them for menus, letterheads, visiting cards or e-mails, as two of his types are available at My Fonts. 

King's Fount: 'e' with diaeresis (My Fonts version)

The digital fonts include letters that Ricketts did not design, such as ligatures, or special symbols, for example the copyright and euro symbols. Ricketts did not draw numerals for his fonts (Vale Type, Avon Type and King's Fount), but the digital version can supply them. The modern user can now write about any given subject in Vale Type or King's Fount, discarding the many modern types that are at his disposal, however, what this new use of these types really demonstrates is that the writer is not modern and that he has no regard for the 'unity of the book' that Ricketts stood for.

Vale Type: fraction, a quarter (My Fonts version)

Vale Type, paragraph mark (My Fonts version)

King's Fount: question mark (My Fonts version)

12. The Legion Book

In August, Peter Harrington's catalogue 78 offered for sale a copy of The Legion Book and only one month later the same copy turned up in a catalogue issued by the London bookseller Henry Sotheran Limited. The price went up from £5,000 to £8,500. This copy is one of a hundred special copies reserved for presentation by the Prince of Wales, later King Edward VIII, bound in white pigskin, decorated in gilt and blind after a design by Charles Ricketts. It was auctioned earlier in the year on 4 May by Lyon & Turnbull of Edinburgh, fetching no more than the lower estimate of £1,500.

Upper cover of The Legion Book, special edition (1929)

The copy on offer is number 23, signed and dedicated by the Prince to George, Earl Haig, who was the son of Douglas. Douglas Haig (1861-1928) was commander during the Battle of the Somme, the third Battle of Ypres and the Hundred Days Offensive during World War I, and he was given an earldom in 1919. The reputations of both the commander and the Prince were not rock solid, and Haig's suffered a blow in the sixties when it was argued that he had been responsible for the highest number of British casualties during the war, while the Prince (King Edward VIII) went into exile in France after his abdication in 1936 and turned out to be charmed by Nazi politics. Long before all that happened, Haig was involved in the creation of the Royal British Legion, of which the Prince acted as a patron. The Legion Book helped to raise funds and the special edition was not for sale as all hundred copies were 'held in the gift of H.R.H. Prince of Wales'. The Prince dedicated number 23 to the eleven year old son of Haig, George, second Earl Haig (born 1918) and apparently the family sold this copy after his death in 2009.

Signature of Edward, Prince of Wales, 1929

Over the years special copies of this edition have appeared on the market, such as one with a unique trial binding of quarter-inch oak boards, the spine and paste-down endpapers of cloth, stamped with Ricketts's design, and a binder's copy that during the Second World War had been given to J. Cheney for safekeeping. The pigskin edition was bound by Wood in London.

Binder's stamp, inner lower cover.

While Peter Harrington listed copy number 23 under the heading of the editor, Captain H. Cotton Minchin, adding a caption printed in red alerting prospective buyers that this copy was 'Signed by everyone involved' (not all copies bear the signature leaves), Henry Sotheran Limited decided, at the last moment, to insert this copy in their catalogue on private press publications (part of their series of anniversary catalogues), listed as number 1a, under the heading 'Churchill, Sir Winston'. Churchill contributed a two-page essay on Haig. The difference between Minchin and Churchill amounts to £3,500. When the renowned firm of Warrack & Perkins offered a copy in 1982, the price was less than this difference, they offered it for 'a mere' £2,750.

The binding design has been called a perfect example of Ricketts's geometrical style, but obviously it has partly been based on a compromise, as the mascot of the legion had to be included in the design. Should we recognize a goat - the official mascot - or rather a cat in the curious central figure on the upper cover?

Upper cover of The Legion Book (detail)

11. The mysterious Hélène

This week's blog is a contribution by Paul Delaney. We met in 1986, when he lived in London and I well remember the study where he was then writing the biography of Charles Ricketts that appeared in 1990 (Clarendon Press) and that, twenty years on, still is the authorative work on the life of Ricketts. 

The mysterious Hélène de Sousy, mother of Charles de Sousy Ricketts

Every biographer knows that he risks getting things wrong, and tries his best to guard against this. Sometimes, however, you are led astray by the most unexpected things.

Dustwrapper for J.G.P. Delaney, Charles Ricketts. A biography (1990)

When writing the biography of Charles Ricketts, I had difficulty in pinning down Ricketts's mother. Only rarely did he mention her; and he said almost nothing about her family. He said that 'he was born of a French mother, who was bred Italian & had Spanish blood by her father'. He revealed that her full given names were 'Hélène Cornelia Pia Diodata'. His maternal grandfather, he said, had known Rossini. These were the sole references to her family or origins.

However, Ricketts's parents married in a civil ceremony in London on 20 January 1868. The date of this marriage was puzzling, as Ricketts was two years old at the time. In the certificate, Hélène described herself as the widow of a man called Jouhan, and the daughter of Louis, marquis de Sousy; occupation: nobleman. Finally, this was something concrete to go on. There was indeed one French noble family titled de Sousy, which had included a marquis, who was too old to be Hélène's father, and his grandson, a count called Louis of the right period. This was the only possibility, despite the discrepancy in the title. As this was a military family, I found a dossier on Louis, comte de Soucy in the military archives at the Chateau de Vincennes in Paris. One document listed his daughters. None of them was called Hélène Cornelia Pia Diodata.

Charles Robert Ricketts, father of Charles (1838-1883)

In such circumstances, one must formulate a hypothesis that explains all the known facts. As Hélène bore no title, as she had no money, as she seemed to have no inherited possessions and no grand family connections, such as she should have done if she had been the daughter of a marquis, I concluded that she must have been illegitimate. This seemed confirmed by the fact that the marquis's family's name was actually 'de Fitte'; 'de Sousy' was their title. So, had Hélène been legitimate, her name should have been Hélène de Fitte de Sousy. The late marriage also worried me: I guessed it had been a remarriage for legal reasons. So many elements did not quite fit. Clearly, however, something was amiss here.

A few years ago, a woman contacted me claiming that she was a descendant of Ricketts's mother. This intrigued me. I had been told by Ricketts's cousins that his sister's two sons had left no descendants. Yet, there was still the mysterious first husband called Jouhan mentioned in her marriage certificate.

The story of Ricketts's mother that she revealed to me seemed incredible. At first, I refused to believe it. The weight of the evidence eventually persuaded me. Everything that I wrote in my biography about Ricketts’s mother was wrong. The information she had given in her marriage certificate was false. Her maiden name was not 'de Sousy' at all. In fact, Ricketts had no family right to his middle name. She was not 'born French', as Ricketts had claimed. What's more, she had abandoned a first family, a husband (who was not called 'Jouhan') and four children, causing a huge scandal, and disappeared from their lives. As this first marriage had never been dissolved, her marriage to Ricketts's father was bigamous. The only true information in her English marriage certificate was that her father was of noble origin, though he was not the marquis de Sousy.

At the moment, I am not at liberty to reveal more than this. The descendant of Ricketts's mother and I are preparing an article, which will set the record straight.

What intrigues me the most about all this is how much Charles Ricketts knew about his mother's true origins.
                                                                                               Paul Delaney

A signed copy of Delaney's biography of Ricketts

The publication of the full story will be noted in a future message. Thanks are due to Paul Delaney who has kindly written this invited contribution to the blog, which is open to other writers on the subject as well. Please contact me at the address stated in the right-hand column of this page.

10. Book design from the Middle Ages to the future

The University of Antwerp is organizing the conference Book Design from the Middle Ages to the Future on Thursday 29 and Friday 30 September 2011. It will be preceded by the Twelfth Miræus Lecture on Wednesday 28 September in the Nottebohm Hall of the Erfgoedbibliotheek Hendrik Conscience. The lecture will be held by Yuri Cowan (Ghent University) and is entitled 'The Mirror of Everyday Life: Morris' Book Collecting and the Kelmscott Press'. This lecture, according to the programme, will draw on original research into Morris's collecting practices to chart the influence of his library on his and his collaborators' theories in the field of book design.

A paper by Gerard Unger also mentions Morris, whose revival of Jenson's type influenced modern typography and Unger poses the question: 'Does typography on screens need a new William Morris?'

Ricketts's Defence (1899) among other credo's, including several editions of Cobden-Sanderson's The Ideal Book, published by Frederic W. Goudy, G.A. Beale, the Milton S. Eisenhower Library and Gallery 303.

In my own paper, 'Reprinting the Ideals of the Private Press', I will mention almost all private presses from the 1890s, including the Vale Press and the Doves Press. I will talk about a specific group of publications, the private press credos, and especially about their position between nineteenth-century printers' manuals and twentieth-century typographic manifestos.

Ricketts's Defence of the Revival of Printing is among these credos, as is The Ideal Book, the famous tract written by T.J. Cobden-Sanderson. Ricketts's book was reprinted a few times, but Cobden-Sanderson's text, which was far more visionary and less practical than that of Ricketts, was translated, reprinted and summarized many times and extracts from the text appeared in several fine editions.

9. Transitions

The University of Groningen is organizing a conference on the transfer and integration of English culture in the Netherlands and Belgium around 1900. The seminar takes place from 22 to 23 September, see the website Lopende vuurtjes (Spreading like wildfire).

Front cover of the programme for 'Lopende vuurtjes'

The border on the front cover of the programme is taken from the most famous Kelmscott Press edition, The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer (1896, p. 9) and the two different ornaments that are used for the programme were copied after Morris's printer's flowers No. 1 and No. 2 (as described by William S. Peterson in A Bibliography of the Kelmscott Press, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1985, reprint, p. xxxiii). Lieske Tibbe will talk about the relations between Dutch journalists and politicians, such as Leo Simons and Ferdinand Domela Nieuwenhuis, and William Morris. They had met Morris in London.

The critics Jan Veth and Hermine Marius wrote about English art in several papers and magazines - there will be a talk about this subject by the organizer of the conference, Anne van Buul - but they did not write about Morris before his death in 1896 and his private press work was not well known in the Netherlands. Veth advocated other artists, especially Charles Ricketts and Charles Shannon, and wrote long laudatory articles about their books (Daphnis and Chloe, Hero and Leander) and their magazine The Dial.

The early Dutch praise for Ricketts and Shannon was summarized by J.G. Paul Delaney in his biography Charles Ricketts (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1990, p. 91). Veth's articles led to a series of exhibitions containing their work and in 1895 Van Wisselingh's gallery in Amsterdam devoted an entire exhibition to Ricketts and Shannon - a recognition they had not yet experienced in England. My talk at the Groningen seminar will mention Ricketts repeatedly. I will try to shed light on the slow transfer of the private press ideals to the Dutch book world.


Programme for 22 and 23 September 2011

8. A great artist

In the decade that Ricketts published his studies The Prado and its Masterpieces (1903), Titian (1910) and Pages on Art (1913), it was not yet customary to include a list of references or footnotes to disclose one's sources. Quotations were not easy to verify. Ricketts's Titian does not include a bibliography.

In France, the notion that an art-historical study ranks as 'belles-lettres' lived longer than in England. The same goes for a biography, which could apparently do without footnotes, references, or an index, without being seen as a fictionalized life (vie romancée).

Camille Mauclair (born as Séverin Faust, 1872-1945) wrote a book about Titian as well: Titien (Paris, Éditions Nilsson, 1925). Mauclair initially was a poet and, in 1898, he wrote a novel, Le Soleil des Morts, portraying several important fin-de-siècle artists.

Cover of Titien (1925) with the cover title: Le Titien

Camille Mauclair went on to write biographies and travel books. His book about Titian appeared in a series of 'Maîtres anciens et modernes' (Old and Modern Masters) and there are no footnotes or references. In a 'Note' at the end, however, he writes: 'Les références sont multiples' and he only mentions two authors whose books were easy to come by, one by Maurice Hamel and one by Henry Caro-Delvaille. Camille Mauclair knew about Ricketts's study, though, and he sent a copy of his own book to the British connoisseur.

Title page and frontispice of Titien (1925)

The book is printed on paper that is not destined for eternity and the pages show the marks of its ageing process. In Ricketts's copy the author of Titien (or Le Titien, as the cover has it) has written an autograph dedication: 'Au grand artiste Charles Ricketts avec l'admiration et la sympathie de Camille Mauclair'. Did Mauclair use Ricketts's book on Titian? Has Ricketts read Mauclair's biography? The dedication copy of this book was recently sold at auction and acquired by a private collector.

Dedication page in Titien (1925) [private collection]

7. Illustrated initials

Before Charles Ricketts designed  a few (complete and incomplete) series of initials for the Vale Press editions (1896-1904), he not only had been inspired for these by William Morris's initials for the Kelmscott Press, or by initials in early printed books, he had also been testing his capabilities as a designer of initials for commercial magazines.

Initial 'P' (prospectus for the Vale Press edition of William Blake's Poetical Sketches, 1899)

Most Victorian periodicals, including children's monthlies and art magazines, commissioned head- and tailpieces as well as illustrated initials for stories, poems, and articles. There was quite an army of artists involved, and competition was stiff. During the 1880s and 1890s Ricketts was one of them. Although these drawings were considered hackwork, Ricketts was gradually able to distinguish himself from other artists, not only by signing his work with his full name or his initials CR, - he also introduced typical art nouveau style elements.

From Atalanta, vol. III, no. 27 (December 1889), p. [190] 

Some of Ricketts's early illustrated initials are playful or experimental, like the small initials for 'Whittington's advancement' (Atalanta, December 1889), others show a more serious awareness of historical examples, such as the one for an essay by Wilhelmina Munster on 'A Woman's Thoughts upon English Ballad-Singers and English Ballad-Singing', published in The Woman's World, edited by Oscar Wilde (1888).


From The woman's world, vol. I, no. 8 (June 1888), p. 372.

When Ricketts embarked on his publishing activities for the Vale Press, he had had a long training as a draughtsman of initials.

6. A delicate wraith

In Oscar Wilde. Recollections by Jean Paul Raymond Charles Ricketts wrote about himself as 'an elderly Englishman who, years ago, had known Oscar Wilde'. Thus he introduced himself as a character in a story about the 1890s. 

Later, Michael Lewis MacLennan, the Canadian dramatist, wrote a play about Ricketts and his lifelong companion, Charles Shannon, Last Romantics. It was first presented in February 2003 by the Necessary Angel Theatre Company and The National Arts Centre, Toronto. The description of Ricketts introduces him as:  'stooped, high reedy voice, flamboyant'.

Ricketts has not yet been turned into a character of a novel or a television series, however, he has made something of an appearance in a detective novel, published in 2002 by Orion Books in London: Fiona Mountain's Pale as the Dead.

The story is about a link between the present and the Pre-Raphaelites. The leading character of the novel is Natasha Blake, an 'ancestor detective', whose research, to quote a review, 'takes us from the Cotswolds and Oxford to Highgate Cemetery and back again', focussing on Elizabeth (Lizzie) Siddal, Rossetti's wife who in 1862 took her own life.

The author has the detective reading a book about the Pre-Raphaelite movement: 'She stood up, went to the bookcase and pulled out The Pre-Raphaelite Dream', a book by William Gaunt, most editions of which have appeared under the original title: The Pre-Raphaelite Tragedy. She found 'two mentions of Lizzie in a chapter entitled "Flower of Death".' One of the illustrations is of Rossetti's painting 'Beate Beatrix'.

'The text below that illustration read: "Her expression varied in shades of sadness, as if a premonition of early death overshadowed her life," wrote Sharp, whilst Ricketts called her "A delicate wraith, a ghost in the house of the living".' (p. 102).

5. CR and AE

Volume V of The Oxford History of the Irish Book, edited by Clare Hutton and Patrick Walsh, appeared earlier this year. For this volume, The Irish Book in English 1891-2000, Warwick Gould has written a chapter on Macmillan's Irish list (p. 481-516).

In 1904 George W. Russell (who wrote under the initials 'A.E.') transferred his publications from John Lane to Macmillan: 'Always the holy fool, Russell, without obsequiousness but with an undeniable indirection, got the very best for himself and numerous other Irish writers he recommended to the firm' (p. 492). 

Russell's Collected Poems sold rather well. Between 1913 and 1919 four editions of a thousand copies were printed, issued in dark-blue cloth: 'single gilt border around the front cover, lettering of title and author's name ("A.E.") in black capitals on spine and top board' (p. 493). Gould points out that Russell preferred these austere bindings to those of his fellow Irish writer W.B. Yeats. The Yeats bindings were designed by Thomas Sturge Moore, or by Charles Ricketts, who, for example, designed a decorative blind-stamped cover for the uniform edition of Yeats's collected works in the twenties. The spine design for these collected works was used by Macmillan for another series of books of poetry by John Freeman, Katherine Tynan, James Stephens, Lennox Robinson, and others.

Another design by Ricketts was done for a series of selected poems, the first one being The Golden Treasury of Modern Lyrics, selected and arranged by Laurence Binyon (Macmillan, 1924). This design - a blind-stamped upper board, the spine printed in gold - was later used for Russell's Selected Poems (1935), whether he liked it or not. The front cover had lines, dots, leaves, flowers, and butterflies blind-stamped on blue cloth. The dust-wrapper shows a quote from Russell and a portrait by the Polish painter count Casimir Dunin Markievicz, who lived in Dublin.

 

        

4. Poems in Prose

The online journal Victorian Network (Summer 2011) has published an essay by Jeremiah Mercurio (University of St. Andrews) on two unpublished drawings by Charles Ricketts. Part of a series of drawings dating from the early nineteen-twenties, they illustrate the Poems in Prose of Oscar Wilde. According to his letters to Gordon Bottomley, Ricketts first made sketches for an intended publication in the early eighteen-nineties. These were never used and were subsequently mislaid. In 1918 Ricketts found a batch of old sketches and drawings and in 1924 he executed eight new drawings 'in my old manner'.

Two of these are discussed by Jeremiah Mercurio in his essay 'Faithful Infidelity. Charles Ricketts' Illustrations for Two of Oscar Wilde's Poems in Prose'. He argues that while Ricketts's illustrations for 'The Disciple' and 'The House of Judgment' reproduce the meanings of the texts they represent, they also 'parody and elaborate on them'. This way, Ricketts was able to declare his 'independence as an illustrator' and 'his autonomy as a thinker'. Ricketts's 'illustrational strategies', according to Mercurio, are designed 'to disprove Wilde's description of visual art as limited compared to language'.

The article in the Victorian Network also illustrates the two drawings, which are kept in the collection of the Tullie House Museum & Art Gallery, Carlisle.

The 'Poems in Prose' have been published in The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde. Volume I. Poems and Poems in Prose (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2000).

3. Early Dutch collectors

The history of the private press movement in the Netherlands (1910-2010) was recently the subject of an exhibition and a book. There is also a website, hosted by the Koninklijke Bibliotheek, National Library of the Netherlands: The Ideal Book. The publication contains more information than the website which does not include the chapters about the origin of the term 'private press' or the emergence of the private press movement in countries such as England, Belgium, Germany and the United States. This last chapter mentions a few names of Dutch collectors of private press books, but not much is known about their intentions, the fate of their collections, or their personal life.

There is one J. Visser from Rotterdam, for example, who lent books to the 1904 exhibition at the Plantin Moretus museum in Antwerp where a multitude of modern books was on show. Visser loaned Kelmscott and Vale Press books among others. The collector N.J. Beversen (who also owned a few Ricketts items) provided books by the Doves Press and Essex House Press. Beversen (1860-1932) is better known, he was a classicist and a rector of the Rotterdam grammar school. Edward Koster (1861-1937), another classicist, was a teacher at the Haganum grammar school of The Hague. He possessed books by a variety of private presses, including Ricketts's Vale Press. 

A newspaper clipping brought another collector to my attention: it mentions the property of 'a gentleman at Harlem' (the Dutch city of Haarlem, near Amsterdam). His collection was auctioned by R.W.P. de Vries in Amsterdam on Tuesday 23 February 1926. More than his place of residence is not known. There is no introduction to the catalogue, nor a photograph. Almost two hundred English private press books were on sale. The catalogue lists six pages of Vale Press books, revealing that the collection was almost complete, lacking only a copy of The Blessed Damozel (Rossetti), The Centaur, The Bacchante (Guérin) and the Catalogue of Mr. Shannon's Lithographs (Ricketts). The newspaper reported that the complete works of Shakespeare in 39 volumes were sold for ten Dutch guilders. All books had the original vellum, paper or buckram bindings. There were no special copies on vellum (such as the one illustrated below), however, this may well have been the largest Vale Press collection in the Netherlands at the time. Unfortunately, the collector is not identified. 

The Vale Press edition of Tennyson's Lyric Poems (1900), one of ten copies on vellum, from the collection of the Koninklijke Bibliotheek, The Hague. [Photo by Jos Uljee. © Koninklijke Bibliotheek.]



2. Recollections of Oscar Wilde

A new edition of Ricketts's Recollections of Oscar Wilde is for sale in the shop of the Victoria and Albert Museum during the exhibition The Cult of Beauty. The original edition was published in Bloomsbury by The Nonesuch Press on 21 July, 1932, set and printed by George W. Jones at the Dolphin Press in 800 copies on Van Gelder paper. It was bound in full white buckram, gilt with a geometric and figurative design by Ricketts, reminiscent of his famous design for The Sphinx. The white cloth binding was protected by a black paper wrapper. In Prospectus and Retrospectus of the Nonesuch Press 1932 it was announced as a 'tenebrous Memoir of Oscar Wilde, which he finished last year only a little before he died'. Ricketts had died on 7 October, 1931.


The new facsimile edition states that it reprints the book 'for the first time'. However, in 1969 there was an earlier one, published at Folcroft, PA, by the Folcroft Press. But as Ricketts's recollections of Wilde have been quoted over and over, the book surely merits another reprint. It is not yet listed on the website of the publisher, Pallas Athene (*), but a prospectus mentions the ISBN 978 1 84368 0710 and the price of £19.99. At the V&A the price is £12.99. The paper cover reproduces Ricketts's original binding design. (The 1932 edition is offered by book dealers for anything between £120 and £300.) The Pallas Athene edition includes a well-informed new afterword ('Ricketts and Wilde') by Matthew Sturgis, author of  Aubrey Beardsley. A Biography and of Passionate Attitudes. The English Decadence of the 1890s.

(*) See the website of Pallas.

1. The art of the reprint

Charles Ricketts, the artist, critic, writer and collector (1866-1931), has never reached the fame of his contemporary Aubrey Beardsley. However, like Beardsley, he manages to attract new generations of book collectors, readers, art connoisseurs and scholars, and the number of studies devoted to his work is on the increase. Today, I have started this blog on the work of Charles Ricketts to give the interest in his work a home address. This blog will regularly pay attention to new studies and old findings about Ricketts.

In 'The Art of the Reprint', a paper I delivered at the conference The Book in Art and Science (the Nineteenth Annual Conference of the Society for the of History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing in Washington,  14-17 July 2011), I discussed several reprints of books that Ricketts published at his Vale Press.

His essay on typography, A Defence of the Revival of Printing, first published in 1899 (250 copies on paper, 10 on vellum), for example, was reprinted in a facsimile edition by the Battery Park Book Company in 1978 (edition of 600 copies). Earlier, in 1926, the text was published by the Italian private press Officina Bodoni. This was a translation, Dell'arte della stampa, and even the name of the author was translated into Italian: Carlo Ricketts. Only 125 copies were printed. Another edition was printed by Gilbert Beale as the fifth publication of his 'Cadenza Reprints on Typography', of which about a hundred copies were printed. 

The Officina Bodoni edition is the most expensive of these reprints, followed by the Vale Press edition (of course, a vellum copy of the Vale Press edition is more expensive and elusive). The Cadenza press edition is surprisingly difficult to find. The cheapest edition is yet another reprint, which is printed on demand by BLTM Books, distributed by Book1One in Rochester, New York. This 'edition', more of a bunch of photocopies than a book (lacking part of the decorative border on the first text page), is based on the digitized version of the Bancroft Library copy (University of California, Berkeley). The digitized version is available, for free, on the website of the Internet Archive.

A collection of private press books these days may look like this:

or like this:

Or, a combination of both... Book collectors have more choices than ever to make...