Gibbings, Robert, 1889-1958.

Iorana! : a Tahitian journal / by Robert Gibbings ; with wood-engravings by the author. (London [England] : Duckworth, 1932)

Gibbings was one of the leading English wood-engravers of the twentieth century and it was mainly through his efforts that the Golden Cockerel Press was so successful. In 1929 he visited Tahiti. His book is most notable for the beautiful illustrations but his prose is also evocative, written with an artist’s eye, and a bohemian sensibility,

That night we slept on the sand. Lying on our backs and looking at the stars, we could feel the earth tearing through space, and I gripped the coral lest centrifugal force should hurl us into space. We rose to an opal dawn, no line between sky and sea, everything lost in an iridescent haze, as it were the concavity of some gargantuan pearl shell; and I thought of the millions of city dwellers sleeping each night in their papered cupboards. (p. 51)

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