#wood engraving wednesday
Wood Engraving Wednesday
This week we present more prints by the legendary American wood engraver John DePol (1913-2004), this time as illustrations for a collection of poems by the English translator and poet Walter Shewring,Later Verses and Earlier, printed letterpress in 1988 in an edition of 150 copies at Neil Shaver’s Yellow Barn Press in Council Bluffs, Iowa. Shaver handset the 14 pt. Joanna type with Perpetua Titling, and printed the edition on dampened Frankfurt Cream paper. Of DePol, Shaver writes:
John DePol ranks today as one of America’s top wood engravers… . Since the 1930′s John DePol has been capturing little corners of our world with the engraver’s burin. Small churches in France, the back alleys of Ireland, the aging buildings of New York, all have been frozen in time with serene, sometimes dramatic, skill. He is sensitive to atmosphere and the romantic age of things, the mood of changing seasons and the images of history. His is the perfect talent for the Shewring verse.
Our copy of Later Verses and Earlier is a gift from our friend Jerry Buff.
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Wood Engraving Wednesday
J. J. LANKES
Julius John Lankes (1884-1960) was an American illustrator, wood engraver, and woodcut artist. Influenced by the Arts & Crafts movement, Lankes helped elevate wood relief prints to a fine art, executing over 1300 prints in his career. One of the last books he illustrated with wood engravings was Wisconsin author and publisher August Derleth’sCountry Poems, shown here, printed in Iowa City by Carroll Coleman at his Prairie Press in 1956. Coleman printed the text in Bulmer Roman and Original Oldstyle Italic types. Our copy is a gift from our friend Jerry Buff.
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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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Wood Engraving Wednesday
NORA S. UNWIN
English-American artist Nora S. Unwin (1907-1982) is remembered most as a prolific children’s book illustrator and author. Her illustrations for her American friend and collaborator Elizabeth Yates’sAmos Fortune, Free Man won the 1951 Newbery Medal. However, Unwin, who was a member of the renowned publishing family of Allen & Unwin, was also a highly-accomplished wood engraver, having received her training at Leon Underwood’s prestigious London art school, the Kingston School of Art, and finally the Royal College of Art where she received a diploma in design in 1932. She met her lifelong friend Elizabeth Yates in England in 1937 and followed her back to America in 1946, where she remained for the rest of her life, illustrating well over 100 books and writing and illustrating twelve books of her own.
The engravings shown here are from Joseph; the King James Version of a Well-loved Tale, arranged with an introduction by Elizabeth Yates, and printed and bound by the Plimpton Press in 1947 for Alfred A. Knopf in America and the Ryerson Press in Canada. Our copy is another gift from our friend Jerry Buff.
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Wood Engraving Wednesday
GRETCHEN DAIBER
This week we highlight four delightful wood engravings by Washington artist, sculptor, and printmaker Gretchen Daiber that serve as illustrations for Welsh poet Leslie Norris’s 1984 chapbook of poems A Tree Sequence letterpress printed by Suzanne Ferris on handmade papers by Neal Bonham at their Sea Pen Press and Papermill in Seattle, Washington, in a limited edition of 20 copies signed by the poet and artist..
Daiber lives and works in Leavenworth, Washington, a Bavarian-styled village in the Cascade Mountains of central Washington State. She writes that “My work reflects the landscape and environment which I love– the mountains where I live… . my passion is to record and interpret my surroundings with sculpture, pastels, original prints, journal sketches and watercolors.“
We also include two watermark illustrations by Neal Bonham. At first, we couldn’t understand why there are two blank handmade sheets of paper in the middle of the book made of different fibers than the paper in the rest of the book. Then we tuned a page and the light caught the watermarked illustrations of trees and their shadows. Both Ferris and Bonham graduated from the book arts program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison where they were students of the great letterpress printer, book artist, and papermaker Walter Hamady.
Our copy of A Tree Sequence is another donation from our friend Jerry Buff.
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Wood Engraving Wednesday
LINDA LEATHERBARROW
This week we present a few small wood engravings by the Scottish-born author and illustrator Linda Leatherbarrow from her chapbook A Floating Diary: A Collection of Words and Wood Engravings Following a Week Afloat on a Narrow Boat, handprinted in London by Leatherbarrow in an edition of 100 copies at her own Little Bird Press in 1980.
An award-wining short story writer, Leatherbarrow also trained as an artist at Hornsey College of ArtandWalthamstow School of Art, and in the late 1970s started Little Bird Press for her own writing and that of her friends, illustrated with original prints in wood engraving, linocuts, and silk screen. “I began,” she writes, “with an Adana hand press on a table in a corner of my bedroom then progressed to my own workshop above a car showroom on Tottenham High Street,” and would well her books “at Covent Garden Market, craft fairs and bookshops throughout the UK.” She continued illustrating and handprinting until the mid-1980s, when she began writing short stories to great success.
Leatherbarrow has also worked as a librarian, a literary festival organizer, and a university lecturer. In 2010, she retired from lecturing, but continues to write from her home in southwest Scotland.
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