Short and Beautiful Life
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€43.99
A01=Rita Ricketts
art
Ashendene Press
Author_Rita Ricketts
Basil B
bibliographic
bibliography
Bibliophile
Blackwells
Blackwells bookshop
Bodlion
book collecting
Book design
book history
book illustration
book manufacture
book production
British Fine Press
Category=AKHM
Emery Walker
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Eric Gill
Golden cockrel press
history of the book
illustration
John Bungen
Kelmscott
Merton
Michael Drayton
Oxford
private press
publishing
scholar
Shakespeare
The Pilgrims Progress
Weston Library
William Moris
Product details
- ISBN 9781911397298
- Dimensions: 156 x 234mm
- Publication Date: 15 May 2023
- Publisher: Unicorn Publishing Group
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Hardback
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Few have heard of the Shakespeare Head Press, although it ranks alongside William Morris’s Kelmscott, Emery Walker and Cobden-Sanderson’s Doves, Eric Gill’s Golden Cockerel and St John Hornby’s Ashendene. Its origins date to the 1860s, when a young Arthur Henry Bullen, dreamt of printing the whole of Shakespeare. Making his dream a reality, Bullen founded the Shakespeare Head Press in 1904 in an old Tudor house, where Shakespeare would have been a guest.
There are many backstories associated with the Shakespeare Head Press and of the perennial dashed hopes of small presses’, which plagued Bullen. When the Press passed to Basil Blackwell (1921), Bullen’s mantle was assumed by the scholar-printer Bernard Newdigate. For twenty years, he produced a series of finely printed books, yet these were not commercially successful. Blackwell blamed the commodification of literature, and the metamorphoses of books from handcrafted works of art to manufactured objects.
A Short and Beautiful Life reconstructs the lives of Bernard Newdigate and A.H. Bullen, and that of the Shakespeare Head Press. For Sir Basil Blackwell, ‘the exact record of events was secondary to the universal truths it served to illustrate.’ And there is something remarkably contemporary about them.
Rita Ricketts gives prominence in her writing and research of neglected stories. She has been published in the UK, New Zealand, and the US and is a regular commentator in the New Zealand media. Currently a visiting Bodleian Blackwell Fellow, she was one of the recipients of the 2022 European Women’s Leadership Award. Her time is divided between the UK and NZ, where she tries to combine her work with entertaining a tribe of grandchildren.
