Copies of the catalogue (with illustrations) are available from the Rare Books Department

In compiling the catalogue I have drawn on a variety oif sources; in particular I have made extensive use of the following two general works on private presses:

Roderick Cave, The Private press, 2nd ed (new York and London: Bowker, 1983)
Colin Franklin, The Private presses (London: Studio Vista, 1969)

The device on the left is one of the many used by the Nonesuch Press; it is derived from a tapestry once hanging at Nonesuch Castle, which is represented in the background.

B.J. McMullin

October 2000

An exhibition of private press books from the Rare Book Collection
Monash University Library
19 October 2000 to 28 February 2001

This exhibition is designed to illustrate printing and publishing 'outside the main stream' - that is, outside the confines of normal commercial activity. The three elements of the sub-title - private, fine amateur - are not mutually exclusive; nor are they synonymous. Amateur presses are likely to be private, but 'private' has particular connotations within the history of printing, referring to a group of presses founded in London in the 1890s, along with a number of their associates and imitators. Not all private printing is fine either - indeed, given the right circumstances, commercial work can equal that of the private presses, and it is one of the subsidiary purposes of this exhibition to show that the highest standards can be attained by commercial printers. And amateur printing - as the term might (wrongly) imply - is not always fine. In other words, the boundaries are not rigidly drawn, so that it has seemed appropriate to nominate three apparently discrete genres while at the same time allowing that they may flow into one another in particular instances. In general terms the exhibition is confined to a number of English presses which are usually considered as 'private', with a smaller representation of Australian and American work. Examples of fine printing produced by commercial presses bring up the rear.

Commentators have expended much ink on defining what constitutes a private press. Roderick Cave regards as a 'good rule of thumb' John Carter's statement from the Introduction to the exhibition catalogue English Private Presses 1757 to 1961 (London: Times Book Shop):

... the fundamental principle of private press printing ... [is] that, whether or not the press has to pay its way, the printer is more interested in making a good book than a fat profit. He prints what he likes, not what someone else has paid him to print. If now and then he produces something more apt for looking at and handling than for the mundane purpose of reading, remember he is concerned as much with his own pleasure and education as with yours.

One may quibble about elements of this statement, but the essence is widely accepted: that the owner/printer prints what he likes.

Events of the last decade of the nineteenth century are deemed to have ushered in what is referred to as the Private Press Movement, but there are numerous examples of private printing well before this time. Three of these 'precursors' are illustrated in this exhibition: the Strawberry Hill Press, the Middle Hill Press and the Daniel Press.
 

The press at Strawberry Hill, Twickenham was established in 1757 by Horace Walpole (1717-97), 4th Earl of Orford to produce works mainly by himself and his friends. To achieve this end he employed a succession of professional printers to run the press, which had been set up in an outbuilding. In appearance the publications from Strawberry Hill are indistinguishable from commercial publications of the second half of the eighteenth century. The first product of the press was (two) Odes by Thomas Gray, distributed, as with subsequent works, by the London booksellers R. and J. Dodsley. Among the press's publications are Walpole's own Catalogue of the royal and noble authors of England (1758) and Anecdotes of painting in England (1762-71) - but not the one work for which he is remembered, The Castle of Otranto (1764).

On display are:

1. Charles, Lord Whitworth, An Account of Russia as it was in the year 1710 (1758) [sold for the benefit of the poor of Twickenham]
2. Joseph Spence, A Parallel; in the manner of Plutarch: between a most celebrated man of Florence; and one, scarce ever heard of, in England (1758) [sold for the benefit of Mr. Hill, the 'one scarce heard of']

The Middle Hill Press, established in 1822, was the creature of Sir Thomas Phillipps (1792-1872) of Broadway, Worcestershire. Cave places him in the tradition of bibliomania, which had erupted in the early years of the nineteenth century, fostered by Thomas Frognall Dibdin (whose Bibliomania appeared first in 1809) and by the founding of the Roxburghe Club in 1813. Phillipps's aim was to acquire one copy of every book ever printed, and he also amassed a huge collection of manuscripts which it has taken over a century to sort and disperse. His activities have been studied by A.N.L. Munby in a series of Phillipps studies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1951-60), adapted by Nicolas Barker as Portrait of an obsession (London: Constable, 1967). Phillipps was a 'difficult' man with a number of obsessions, among them a virulent anti-Catholicism and an interest in bearers of the family name, however spelt and wherever resident - even in Australia.

Phillipps's avowed intention in setting up his press was to publish the texts of manuscripts from his own or from public collections in order to preserve the information that they contained. Fine printing was not his concern, but edition numbers were severely limited. Like Horace Walpole he engaged professional printers to carry out the printing in his home, though continuing to have some work done commercially. The presswork in Middle Hill printing is often very poor, and the typical binding - flimsy paper over boards - hardly serviceable. The most important work to appear from the press is the catalogue of Phillipps's 23,837 manuscripts, published piecemeal between 1824 and 1871.

On display are:

3. Mr. John Glover's exhibition of his oil and water-colour paintings, 1824 (1868)
4. Catalogue of Roman Catholic relics (1866?)
5. The Middle Hill Press. A short catalogue of some of Sir Thomas Phillipps's privately printed works (1886)
6. Valmai Hankel, Sir Thomas Phillipps & Australia (Adelaide: Sullivan's Cove, 1987; printed at the Nag's Head Press, Christchurch, New Zealand)

The Daniel Press is the only one of these precursors to have been actually operated by its owner, the Reverend C.H.O. Daniel (1836-1919), who himself, with help from members of his family, set his texts (in Fell type obtained from the Oxford University Press) and printed them (on an Albion). Daniel was a fellow and ultimately (1903) Provost of Worcester College, Oxford, where the press was set up in 1874, first employing a miniature press and then (1882) a full-size one. Daniel was particularly interested in the Elizabethan era and the seventeenth century, and many of the Daniel Press publications are of texts from those periods. Equally significant, however, is that the press published a number of works by contemporary authors, notably Robert Bridges. Of the Daniel Press Franklin notes: 'The scope and taste of all the books is quiet, a little off the main road, as his college was. But we do find harmony of design with subject, sympathy between author and printer. It is this apt and happy union which still makes an impression.' The volume of memorials was printed on the Daniel Albion, by then housed in the Bodleian Library.

On display are:

7. The Daniel Press: memorials of C.H.O. Daniel, with a bibliography of the press, 1845-1919 (1921)
8. Robert Bridges, The Feast of Bacchus (1889)
9. Colin Franklin, Poets of the Daniel Press (Cambridge: Rampant Lions Press, 1988)

William Morris (1834-96), who was already established as a designer and maker of furniture, wallpaper, fabrics and the like, began to print in January 1891. His venture into the craft of printing can be ascribed basically to a dissatisfaction with the standard of contemporary commercial printing, particularly when viewed alongside examples from the fifteenth century. The immediate spur to his decision to take up printing had occurred two years earlier, 15 November 1888, when Emery Walker, commercial photo-engraver and collotype printer, gave a lecture - 'Letterpress printing and illustration' - during the first exhibition of the Arts and Crafts Society. Because of his own diffidence as a lecturer Walker chose to speak to a series of lantern-slides, produced from copies of early-printed books in Morris's collection. In selecting the examples for illustration the two arrived at a recognition of what constituted good design in type, the appropriate disposition of print on the page, the harmony of type and illustration, and so on.

The immediate outcome of this study was Morris's decision to add printing to his other craft concerns, to found the Kelmscott Press, so named after his country house in Gloucestershire, though the press itself was located in Hammersmith, London. A further outcome was the decision to design a new typeface, derived from Venetian fifteenth-century faces. This was the Golden type, so called from The Golden legend, which was intended to be the first book printed with it. Golden was followed by the Troy, used in The Recuyell of the historyes of Troye (1893); the Chaucer type is merely a smaller version of the Troy. What we have here is the first manifestation of what came to be a standard component of the private presses which were to follow: the creation of a proprietary type.

At Morris's death, and once works in progress were completed, the Kelmscott Press closed down. In its short life it had produced 53 works, including editions of various English poets - Shelley, Keats, Herrick, Coleridge and D.G. Rossetti for example - Caxton reprints and Morris's own prose romances. The press's greatest achievement was its Chaucer, the yardstick by which all subsequent fine printing has been measured. Opinions vary about Kelmscott books: while there is disagreement over the readability of Kelmscott types and the appropriateness of the decoration and illustration there is total agreement on the superb technical achievement. What is also not in doubt is the influence of Morris's example on other private press printers, including Ashendene and Doves, the other two members of the great triumvirate who set up shop in the last decade of the nineteenth century.

On display are:

10.  The Kelmscott Chaucer
       (1896) facsimile, printed for the Basilisk Press, London, by John Roberts Press in Clerkenwell,
       completed 31 December 1974; with Companion Volume by Duncan Robinson.
       Binding cloth printed by Liberty, from the 'Larkspur' pattern designed by Morris in 1874)
11.  Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Poems (1896)
11a. Virgil (trans. William Morris), The Aeneids (Chiswick Press, 1902, in the Golden type)
12.  Volsunga Saga (trans. Eirikr Magnusson and William Morris, 1901, in the Golden type)

A number of other private presses were founded in the 1890s, their operators inspired by Morris's example or consciously imitating his work. Prominent among these lesser presses were the Essex House Press, the Vale Press and the Eragny Press.

The Essex House Press was the creation of C.R. Ashbee, who established the Guild of Handicraft at Essex House in Mile End Road, London in 1886, whence it moved to Chipping Campden, Gloucestershire in 1902. The first book appeared in 1898. The Essex House Press project was inseparable from the Arts and Crafts movement, which Ashbee describes as having begun 'with the object of making useful things, of making them well and of making them beautiful'. Critics, however, have been practically unanimous in damning Essex House printing as being contaminated by what Cave calls ' "articraftiness" of the worst kind'. Ashbee had taken over the presses and some of the workmen from the Kelmscott Press, but not the type, so that he designed his own face, the Endeavour (in its larger form the King's Prayer Book), described by D.B. Updike as 'eccentric, obscure, and dazzling'.

On display is:

13. Laurence Housman, Mendicant rhymes (Chipping Campden, 1906)

The Vale Press was established in 1896 by Charles Ricketts, who by this time was already designing books for commercial publishers; among private press operators he is the one who, according to Franklin, 'stands comparison with Morris'. Indeed, it is said that on his deathbed Morris wept in admiration when shown an example of Vale Press printing. The press closed in 1904, when Ricketts decided that 'the number of books which were suitable to the conditions of the firm had dwindled with time'. Vale Press printing was actually carried out at the Ballantyne Press, where a hand-press and pressman were reserved for Ricketts's sole use. A possible contributing factor in the decision to reduce the activities of the press and then to close it down was a fire at Ballantyne's in 1899 which destroyed most of Ricketts's materials.

Again, the Vale Press had its proprietary types: the Vale, the Avon and the King's - the last described by Cave as 'horrid', with its 'very black and fussy mixture of debased roman and pseudo-uncial'. The 46 works produced by the Vale Press represent an eclectic mix of standard literary texts, including a 39-volume Shakespeare. In anticipation of closing the press Ricketts tossed the punches and matrices into the Thames, asserting that 'it is undesirable that these founts should drift into hands other than their designer's and become stale by unthinking use'. His example was to be followed by at least two other owners of proprietary types.
On display are:

14. John Milton, Early poems (1896)
15. Charles Ricketts, A Defence of the revival of printing (1899)

The Eragny Press was established in London by Lucien Pissarro (son of Camille) and his wife Esther in 1894, when they bought a press and began to teach themselves to print. Ricketts was sufficiently impressed by their work that he allowed them to use the Vale type, but in anticipation of the closing of the Vale Press they designed their own, the Brook, modelled on the Vale. The press survived until the outbreak of war in 1914, and the type material remained unused until 1947, when Esther threw punches, matrices and type into the Channel (Lucien had died in 1944). The Pissarros' enthusiasm was for illustration rather than printing, their books being especially noted for their coloured wood engravings. Much of their work - particularly in the early days and in volumes produced for the Société des cent bibliophiles and the Société du livre contemporain - was in French, of authors such as Perrault, Villon and Ronsard.

On display is:

16. Riquet à la Houppe. Deux versions d'un conte de ma mère Loye (1907) (mounted in Lucien Pissarro, Notes on the Eragny Press (Cambridge: privately printed [at Cambridge University Press], 1957)

Among imitators of Morris was the American Elbert Hubbard (1856-1915), who, after visiting Morris in 1894, became an enthusiast for the Arts and Crafts movement in general, for printing in particular. He set up the Roycroft Shop at East Aurora, New York along the lines of the Essex House community, eventually comprising about 500 men engaged in various crafts. After idealistic beginnings, texts hand-set and hand-printed, recourse was had to mechanised processes. In the judgment of Carl Purington Rollins, Printer to Yale University, 'Hubbard's printing was unbelievably bad: it was bad in itself, it was ludicrous as a copy of Kelmscott work. As a follower of the Arts and Crafts movement, he was beneath contempt, both artistically and ethically'. Certainly the editions published in yapp suede do not as a rule rise above the average level of ordinary commercial work, but among the Roycrofters' work there were some which achieved somewhat higher standards.

On display are:

17. Elbert Hubbard, Little journeys to the homes of English authors: William Morris (1900)
18. Elbert Hubbard, This then is a William Morris book (1907)

Of the triumvirate of great presses the Ashendene, founded by St. John Hornby in late 1894, was the second and by far the longest living: its last publication, a bibliography of the press, appeared in 1935. The name Ashendene derives from the family estate in Hertfordshire, where the press was first located in a summer-house, but in 1900 it was removed to Shelley House, Chelsea. Hornby joined the firm of W.H. Smith in 1893, eventually becoming a director, and as part of his induction he spent several months at the firm's printing works, where he learnt to set type and pull proofs on a hand-press, an experience which, added to his acquaintance with the Daniel Press while a student at Oxford and reinforced by a visit to the Kelmscott Press in early 1895, inspired him to take up printing himself.

The Ashendene too had its proprietary types, Subiaco and Ptolemy, which were semi-gothic rather than the roman favoured by most of the other presses. Hornby was not concerned with costs, and the choice of what to print was determined by his own taste in literature and the need for texts which 'gave scope for a certain gaiety of treatment in the use of coloured initials and chapter-headings'. The total output was 41 works, among them a number of substantial folios. The choice of English texts was fairly conventional, but Ashendene is distinguished for its Italian editions of Boccaccio and Dante; the latter, in three volumes (1902-05), is regarded as the press's greatest achievement.

On display are:

19. A Descriptive bibliography of the books printed at the Ashendene Press MDCCCXCV-MCMXXXV (1935; 1976 facsimile, slightly reduced)
20. Colin Franklin, The Ashendene Press (Dallas, Texas: Bridwell Library, Southern Methodist University, 1986; set in Monotype Bembo, designed and printed by W. Thomas Taylor, Elaine Smyth and Bradley Hutchinson, Austin, Texas)

The third of the triumvirate, in terms of date of foundation, was the Doves Press, established in 1900 by T.J. Cobden-Sanderson at Hammersmith, its name being taken from the nearby Doves public house. Like Morris, Cobden-Sanderson (1840-1922) came to printing late in life, in his case after a brief brilliant episode as a bookbinder (1884-93). He is supposed to have invented the expression 'Arts and Crafts', and it was he who invited Emery Walker to give his celebrated lecture. Moreover, he was a friend of Morris, but even so it was not until 11 December 1898 that he confided to his journal:

I must, before I die, create the type for to-day of "the Book Beautiful," and actualize it - paper, ink, writing, printing, ornament and binding.
I will learn to write, to print and to decorate.

His tract The Ideal book or book beautiful was the second publication of the Doves Press, February 1901, but as with much of his reflective writing its 'cosmic' tone makes it at times incoherent.

Cobden-Sanderson found his ideal type in the fount used in the 1470s by Nicolas Jenson, a Frenchman working in Venice, a fount which Emery Walker translated into the Doves type. This is the only type used at the press, and in only one size, and none of the Doves Press books are illustrated, the only form of decoration being the occasional use of red; hence they lack the variety exhibited by the products of some of the other private presses. To some observers they are austere, even 'too perfect'; but there is no argument about their technical achievement. Typically volumes were bound in limp vellum, at the Doves Bindery. The major achievement of the Doves Press was its five-volume Bible (1903-05), printed in black and red, with 500 copies on paper, two on vellum.

The Doves Press had started out as a partnership between Cobden-Sanderson and Walker, but differences soon arose: Cobden-Sanderson resented the fact that Walker - who had various other business interests to attend to - would simply pop in for a few minutes at a time to check how things were going, whereas for Cobden-Sanderson the press was an all-absorbing obsession, to the extent that he identified himself as the Doves Press. Despite an agreement that the type should go to the survivor Cobden-Sanderson consigned punches, matrices and type to the Thames from Hammersmith Bridge in a series of comic excursions recorded in the journals. (The journals were published in 1926 by his son Richard, with all references to Walker edited out.)

On display are:

21. T.J. Cobden-Sanderson, Ecce mundus: Industrial ideals, and The Book beautiful (Hammersmith: Hammersmith Publishing Society, 1902)
22. Alfred Lord Tennyson, Seven poems & two translations (1902)
23. T.J. Cobden-Sanderson, London: a paper read at a meeting of the Art Workers Guild, March 6 1891 (1906)
24. Catalogue raisonné of books printed & published at the Doves Press , 2nd ed(May 1911)

The heyday of the private press may well have been the period between the two world wars. Though some presses did not survive the Depression, others continued through the Second World War and yet others were revived after the war. One characteristic of the presses of these years is their emphasis on illustration, especially through the use of wood-engravings. This exhibition is confined to volumes which were published in the inter-war years, and the examples have been chosen primarily in order to display their illustrations.

The Golden Cockerel Press was started in 1920 by Harold Midgeley Taylor in a hut at the rear of his house in Waltham St. Lawrence, Berkshire. Initially the intention was that authors (among whom A.E. Coppard was the first to be published) should share the tasks of setting and printing their own works, but when their enthusiasm waned and they drifted away the emphasis shifted from publishing original work by contemporary authors to producing 'beautifully printed editions of the Classics at prices which are conducive to that better craftsmanship' - the authors published in 1923 comprised Sir Thomas Browne, Spenser, Apuleius, Jeremy Taylor and Longus. On Taylor's death in 1925 the press was taken over by Robert Gibbings, and the years to 1934, when Christopher Sandford became owner, are considered the period of the press's greatest achievements. Under Sandford Golden Cockerel became a publishing press, based in London, its printing being done by commercial printers such as the Chiswick Press. The Gibbings period in particular is noted for the wood-engravings appearing in many of the books, by artists among whom were Gibbings himself, Eric Ravilious, Eric Gill, Paul and John Nash, John Farleigh, David Jones and Blair Hughes-Stanton. The most highly regarded Golden Cockerel is The Four Gospels (1931), set in the Golden Cockerel type, designed by Eric Gill, who also produced 65 wood-engravings for the publication.

On display are:

25. John Marston, The Metamorphosis of Pigmalions image (1926) - engravings by Rene Ben Sussan
26. Llewelyn Powys, The Book of days (1937) - etchings by Elizabeth Corsellis
27. Consequences: a complete story in the manner of the old parlour game in nine chapters, each by a different author (1932) - frontispiece engraved by Eric Ravilious
28. Bligh's voyage in The Resource (1937) - engravings on wood by Peter Barker-Mill
29. The First Fleet: the record of the foundation of Australia (1937) - engravings on wood by Peter Barker-Mill
30. The Golden Cockerel Greek anthology (1937) - line-engravings on zinc by Lettice Sandford

The Gregynog Press was founded by the sisters Gwen and Daisy Davies in 1922 at their home, Gregynog Hall, near Newtown, Montgomeryshire, Wales. Their intention in buying the Hall, in 1920, had been to provide a centre where ex-servicemen and others could recuperate and be trained in a craft; in the event plans for pottery and weaving were abandoned, and printing and wood-engraving were the only crafts taken up, but without including any training other than that provided on the job for locals hired to work at the press. The Hall also became a conference centre and a venue for musical performances, an activity closer to the hearts of the Davies sisters, who took little part in the activities of the press. Relations with staff were seldom easy: George Fisher, the chief binder, stayed for 20 years, but otherwise there was a constant coming and going of compositors, pressmen, binders and artists, among the last Blair Hughes-Stanton. Other considerations apart, the remoteness of Gregynog was a factor in peoples' disinclination to stay. The Gregynog type was designed by Eric Gill and first used in 1935. An average of two books a year were produced up to 1940, along with a good deal of jobbing work - for example for the festivals of music and poetry - and some printing in Welsh was undertaken. Among Gregynog books the most highly regarded is Joinville's History of St. Louis (1937). An added distinction of the Gregynog Press is the special bindings provided for varying proportions of each publication - in the case of The Lamentations of Jeremiah (1933) all 250 copies were bound in either Hermitage calf or Oasis morocco.

On display are:

31. Henry Vaughan, Poems (1924)
32. The Lamentations of Jeremiah (1933)
33. Loyd Haberly, Anne Boleyn and other poems (1934).

The Fanfrolico Press is Australian in origin but essentially English in operation. It dates ultimately from 1922, when John Kirtley began to print in Sydney, but the Fanfrolico Press as such dates from 1923, when Kirtley joined forces with Jack and Philip Lindsay to produce a number of works, culminating in Jack's translation of the Lysistrata of Aristophanes (1925). Kirtley and Jack Lindsay moved to London in early 1926, where Fanfrolico became a publishing press, sponsoring - among other things - further translations of classical authors, many of them illustrated by Norman Lindsay, illustration being 'almost the sine qua non of a book with character'. Kirtley returned to Australia, P.R. Stephensen came and went, and Jack reverted to printing the Fanfrolico books himself, helped by Philip and by Brian Penton. Fanfrolico collapsed in 1930.

Kirtley set up again as a spare-time printer in 1943, at the Mountainside Press, Ferntree Gully, Victoria, where he printed a small number of pieces, started on a number of texts of Australian interest, and completed one work of undeniable grandeur, Fitzgerald's Heemskerck Shoals.

On display are:

34. John Donne, A Defence of women (1925) - pen-and-ink drawings by Norman Lindsay
35. Herondas, The Mimiambs (1929) - decorated by Alan Odle
36. William Morris, The Defence of Guenevere and King Arthur's tomb (1930) - collographs of drawings by D.G. Rossetti
37. Aristophanes, Lysistrata (1926; Chiswick Press) - illustrated by Norman Lindsay
38. Aristophanes, Women in parliament (1929; Chiswick Press) - illustrated by Norman Lindsay
39. John T. Kirtley, Ballade for dream untold (May 1948)
40. Robert D. Fitzgerald, Heemskerck Shoals (1949; Mountainside Press)

The Private Press Movement was not a rocket which exploded in the 1890s and after a few splutters disappeared without trace. Apart from the disciples and imitators there were those individuals who heeded the example but whose aim it was, while not themselves necessarily practising printers, rather to transfer the standards achieved at the private presses to commercial work. The lasting impact of the example of the private presses was thus to raise the standards of commercial book making, at least among those publishers and printers who were sufficiently concerned to take note of what could be achieved by a considered choice of materials and by an informed application of the available technology, not least by the use of Monotype setting and the use of powered presses. As part of this move to improve standards, the function of the book designer became more central.

The influence of Morris was felt strongly in the United States but was manifest less in the establishing of private presses than in the activities of typographers/ designers. Among the most eminent of this group was Bruce Rogers (1870-1957). The first book to name Rogers in the colophon was Homeward songs by the way, published by Thomas B. Mosher in Portland, Maine in 1895; the last was The Life of St. George, published by Rogers himself in the year of his death. In the 60 years of his professional life he worked on both sides of the Atlantic, for a variety of publishers, including the Limited Editions Club, for whom he designed twelve books between 1933 and 1954.

Rogers was a designer not only of books but also of type. His Centaur (first used in Maurice de Guérin's The Centaur in 1915) is one of the most highly regarded of type faces, based on that used by Jenson in Venice in 1470 in his Eusebius. Centaur was made available in a Monotype version in 1929, and a version is available for computer setting (this catalogue is set in 14-point TrueType Centaur). Rogers's influence was also exercised when he was commissioned to report on the state of printing at Cambridge Press: his report of 1917 - not actually printed until 1950 - led ultimately to the appointment of Stanley Morison as adviser to the University Press and to a period of distinguished printing there. Rogers's greatest achievement is the Oxford Lectern Bible of 1935, set in a specially-condensed form of Centaur; 1000 copies of the standard issue were printed and 200 on a larger hand-made paper, printed damp, by machine. Joseph Blumenthal (in Bruce Rogers: a life in letters, 1870-1957 (Austin: W. Thomas Taylor, 1989), p.159) concludes that 'the Oxford Bible takes its place among the noblest works done since the invention of movable type', a judgment that few would dispute.

On display are:

41. Auguste Bernard, Geofroy Tory (1909) - Riverside Press, Boston
42. Thomas Carlyle, Jocelin of Brakelond (1923) - William Edwin Rudge, New York
43. William Sutherland, Late news of the excursion and ravages of the King's troops (1927) - Harvard University Press, Cambridge
44. Thomas De Quincey, Confessions of an English opium eater (1930) - Shakespeare Head Press, Oxford for the Limited Editions Club
45. Jonathan Swift, Gulliver's travels, 2 vols., The Voyage to Lilliput and The Voyage to Brobdingnag (1950) - The Aldus Printers, New York for the Limited Editions Club
46. Bruce Rogers, Report on the typography of the Cambridge University Press [1917] (1950) - Cambridge University Press, Cambridge

The Nonesuch Press was founded by Francis Meynell in 1923, in partnership with David Garnett and Vera Mendel. In a prospectus for their Congreve (1923) the partners wrote:

The book public may be divided into three parts. The libraries cater for the section of it which reads books without wishing to possess them. A number of "toy" presses cater for collectors who do not read. The Nonesuch Press was founded some three months ago in the interest of those among book-collectors who also use books for reading. It was set up in the determination to choose and make books according to a triple ideal: significance of subject, beauty of format and moderation of price.

Though the press did have printing facilities, for the most part it was a publishing press, commissioning commercial printers to produce volumes according to the detailed instructions provided by Meynell. The texts chosen included a few original works, but the stock in trade was major (and some minor) works from English Literature. Where Nonesuch differed from most other publishers of standard works was in its concern for the state of the text, as in the editions of Restoration dramatists prepared by Montague Summers and the collected Donne and Blake prepared by Geoffrey Keynes. Meynell had to surrender ownership of the press to George Macy in 1936, at which date the great days of the Nonesuch Press can be reckoned to have come to an end.

On display are:

47. John Donne, X sermons (1923) - Kynoch Press, Birmingham
48. William Blake, The Writings (1925) - Chiswick Press, London
49. John Milton, Poems in English (1926) - Cambridge University Press
50. Pindar, Pythian odes (1928) - Robert MacLehose, Glasgow
51. Thomas Beedome, Select poems (1928) - Nonesuch Press
52. Mrs. Coleridge, Letters to Thomas Poole 1799-1834 (1934) - R. & R. Clark, Edinburgh
53. Alexander Pope, Pope's own miscellany (1935) - Oxford University Press

Much fine printing was undertaken in the United States between the wars (and has continued beyond), notably in California. The reasons for the efflorescence in California are various, a significant one probably being the fewness of large printing establishments, which were concentrated on the East Coast, thus allowing beginning printers to find work. Some of the printers who set up in California in this period had moved there from other parts of the country, and many of them at some stage attended trade schools, so that their enthusiasms were matched by their technical competence. Very few were interested in printing by hand, but all were interested in designing attractive books, even if the books themselves were of a utilitarian nature. The importance of certain individuals, such as the bookseller Jake Zeitlin in Los Angeles, who supported aspiring printers, is not to be underestimated. The main factor, however, seems to have been the general wealth of the community and the willingness of institutions such as the Huntington Library to commission the fine printers to produce routine publications. But the main patrons were the book clubs, especially the Book Club of California, founded in 1912 and based in San Francisco, where the earliest printers, such as John Henry Nash and the Grabhorn Brothers (Edwin and Robert) were located.

On display are:

54. C.E. Tripp, Ace High the 'Frisco detective (San Francisco: The Book Club of California [Grabhorn Press], 1948)
55. Robert Grabhorn, A Short account of the life and work of Wynkyn de Worde (San Francisco: The Book Club of California [Grabhorn Press], 1949)
56. Charles Muscatine, The Book of Geoffrey Chaucer (San Francisco: The Book Club of California [Lawton Kennedy], 1963)
57. David Littlejohn, Dr Johnson and Noah Webster: two men and their dictionaries (San Francisco: The Book Club of California [Grabhorn-Hoyem], 1971)
58. Alexander Forbes, California: a history of Upper and Lower California (San Francisco: John Henry Nash, 1937)
59. Marion Brown, San Francisco old & new (San Francisco: Grabhorn Press, 1939)
60. Edward Everett Hale, The Queen of California (San Francisco: Colt Press, 1945)
61. Glenn Todd, Shaped poetry: a suite of 30 typographic prints chronicling this literary form from 300BC to the present (San Francisco: Arion Press, 1981) - (a) Eustorg de Beaulieu, Acrostic, France, 1537
62. 62. - (b) George Herbert, Altar, England, 1633

Two Australian presses which may broadly be considered to be in the tradition of private presses - insofar as they set and print by hand - are included in the exhibition in order to illustrate the more informal side of private-press printing. Both are very much spare-time operations, both conform to the notion that private-press printing represents what the operator chooses to print, and both have done some jobbing printing for organisations which the operators are associated with.

The Pump Press was founded in Adelaide in 1955 by the archivist Gerald Fischer, who took the name for his press from the Aldgate Pump Hotel (in the Adelaide Hills), opposite which he was born. His printing press is a quarto Adana flatbed, his type Garamond and Times New Roman. In his choice of texts he has been attracted by 'certain facts and events that have interested me - usually because of their local historical interest, and, more often than not, because of some element of humour I could detect in them or that I might at least develop in writing briefly about them.' Pump Press publications are mostly four- or eight-page pamphlets with paper covers; and most are illustrated in some manner.

On display are:

63. Song of the Shearer (1960)
64. Paddy Ryan's discovery (1963)
65. Ad Villicum suum (1976)
66. Poor Blenkinsop (1977)
67. Castaways on Lord Howe Island (1980)
68. The Great and lesser 'Tudors' of Burnside (1982)
69. Customs of the chapel (1983)

The Ancora Press (so named from the University's motto, 'Ancora imparo') was founded in 1976 by Jean Whyte within the Graduate School of Librarianship. It was housed first in the basement of the Matheson Library and is now housed in the basement of the Menzies Building. As with similar presses in educational institutions elsewhere, the press was set up to support the teaching of bibliography and textual studies, specifically in Librarianship and English, by demonstrating the techniques of printing by hand. At the same time it has operated as an amateur press, producing shortish original or out-of-the-way texts, mainly of a historical or literary nature. The only text-type used is Monotype Bembo, and publications are usually issued in Cockerell marbled or Canson paper wrappers.

On display are:

70. Examples of booklets
71. Examples of jobbing work