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Wood Engraving Wednesday

PAUL NASH

This week we present original wood engravings by English painter and wood engraver Paul Nash (1889-1946) from the 1928 Golden Cockerel Press edition of Jules Tellier’s 1887 story Abd-er-Rhaman in Paradise, printed in an edition of 400 copies. While he is remembered mainly as a painter, Nash was also an accomplished wood engraver and was an early and  prominent of the Society of Wood Engravers, of which his younger brother John was one of the ten founding members.

Abd-er-Rhaman in Paradise was printed during the period when the Golden Cockerel Press was owned by another prominent English wood engraver, Robert Gibbings, another of the ten founding members of the Society of Wood Engravers. Gibbings could have easily illustrated this book himself, but as Roderick CaveandSarah Manson point out in their definitive A History of the Golden Cockerel Press 1920-1960, 

… for him to commission Paul Nash to illustrate Tellier’s story was brilliant.  Abd-er-Rhaman (1928) was splendidly successful. The reviewer in the Times Literary Supplement didn’t like the engravings, saying it would ‘probably appeal more to the devotees of the most “advanced” form of this art than to more old-fashioned persons,’ but now Nash’s illustrations seem just right.

Our copy is another gift from our friend Jerry Buff.

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