Book of the Week: Golden Cockerel’s The Four Gospels
Quarto. 269 pp. One of 500 copies. Printed in Golden Cockerel type on Batchelor hand-made paper. With sixty-five illustrations from wood engravings by Eric Gill.
This work stands as the crowning achievement of the Golden Cockerel Press, as well as Gill’s finest work as a book artist. "In early illumination, one finds no frontier between decoration and illustration. The work of the artist surrounded the text, explained and ornamented it – sometimes in historiated initials; and as calligraphy is itself a kind of illustration to explain meaning, text and picture formed one thing … That is the balance that (Eric Gill) achieved (in The Four Gospels), greater than the even weight of engraving and type." (Colin Franklin, The Private Presses, p.142).
Bound in half-white pigskin and buckram covered boards by Sangorski & Sutcliffe.
Very faint toning to spine, else a very fine copy, free from the usual foxing to the boards. Bookplate. T.e.g. (Artist and the Book 122; Manet to Hockney 89; Gill 285, Chanticleer 78). (22341) $17,500 Bromer Booksellers.
Stay tuned for my conversation with Roderick Cave, author of The Golden Cockerel Press (British Library/Oak Knoll Press, 2002)
November 24th, 2010 at 8:02 PM
Maybe because I write, there’s just nothing, sensorily, like a book.
The stately print, the self-possession of the pictures, the tactile quality of the paper.
Beautiful.