Whittington Press ~ England
(John and Rose Randle)

Broadside by Whittington Press
Resource Books by Whittington Press

A Vision of Order
Linocuts by Andrew Anderson
Risbury, Herefordshire: Whittington Press, 2011. Edition of 185.

15.5 x 22"; 68 pages. Letterpress printed. Set in 18 and 20 point Caslon. Printed on a heavyweight Zerkall mould-made and Ingres papers.

Of the edition of 185: 150 standard, 35 deluxe.
Standard: Bound in paper illustrated boards with quarter buckram. Titles in gilt on leather spine label. Housed in matching gatefold wrap with tie closure.
Deluxe: Bound in paper over boards with leather spine. With a portfolio of a selection of prints, including The Rock of Cashel, nine sheets joined together to form an image measuring 4.5 x 3 feet. Housed in clamshell box with titles in gilt on leather spine label.

A Vision of Order Includes 35 linocuts by Anderson, with his commentaries on the images. The large format allows most of the prints to be tipped in unfolded.

Whittington Press: "Andrew Anderson's astonishing linocuts are an arresting mix of image, lettering and symbolism. The images show strong influences of his background as an architect with a particular interest in mediaeval architecture; the lettering brings Eric Gill to mind, but with an added fluency and versatility; and much of the symbolism comes from his involvement with cathedral and church architecture. He has written about his work in MATRIX 28, pp. 9-14.

"He combines these three elements with immense skill and with a rare dedication, and yet his images have an astonishing vibrance and magnetism. Little known or seen over the years, hampered perhaps because of their size and the artist's preoccupation with his architectural work, they appear here for the first time in a readily accessible form, each with a note by the artist explaining its content and symbolism."

Andrew Anderson, introduction: "The cuts fall into five groups: (1) plain inscriptions, which were among the first to be done; (2) imagined cities; (3) love poems - courting couples dallying in orchards and beds; (4) country churches; and (5) historic hymns and verses celebrating the age-old festivals of the Christian Year. There are two designs for Christmas cards, a wedding invitation, the front of a house with three windows and a door (an early linocut from my student days), a Crucifixion, lines from a poem by Charles Williams, and a Noah's Ark.

"I am an architect, not an artist. The oblique viewpoint in many of the cuts – geometrical projections of the kind used in architectural drawings to explain buildings – shows this. "

$ 600 standard
$ 1,250 deluxe

Portmeirion
Images by Leslie Gerry
text by Robin Llywelyn
Andoversford, England: Whittington Press, 2008. Edition of 225.

8.125 x 11.75 x 1.5"; 40 pages. Printed on Somerset and Zerkall geglättet mould made papers. Type: 24 point Stephenson Blake Caslon. Original prints drawn on a tablet then digitally printed by the artist. Accordion fold with endpages as pastedowns. Bound in paper-covered matching illustrated boards. Edition of 225: 165 in slipcase; 60 in solander box with set of signed prints and poster.

Whittington Press: "The images in this startling book are unlike anything the Press has attempted before. Drawn on an electronic tablet and printed on a digital printer, their brilliance and inventiveness perfectly mirror the atmosphere of Portmeirion, the extraordinary Italianate village built by the eccentric architect Clough Williams-Ellis on a remote peninsula in North Wales. Clough’s grandson, Robin Llywelyn, who spent much of his childhood with his grandparents at Portmeirion, has written short but evocative texts about each of Leslie Gerry’s seven images of the village. The unusual conception and binding of Portmeirion is a tribute to the genius of Williams-Ellis, who continued the building of Portmeirion until well into his eighties, and its complexities have delayed the publication of the book by several months – just as one imagines Williams-Ellis’ designs must have delayed the builders of Portmeirion. We have seldom had such an enthusiastic reception as the one we have had to Portmeirion."

$240 standard, in slipcase

A View of the Cotswolds
Photographs by Edwin Smith
with essays, commentaries, & a checklist
by Shawn Kholucy, Ian Mackenzie-Kerr, Alan Powers, George Ramsden, Edwin Smith, Veronica Watts and Rory Young
Herefordshire: Whittington Press, 2005.
Edition of 350 (280, standard; 70, deluxe)

9.75 x 13.75"; 56 pages. Set in Poliphilus & Fry's Baskerville. Printed on Bugra-Butten mould-made paper. Tritones printed by CTD Printers. The wood-engraving on the cover is by Edwin Smith.

Whittington Press: "Photographs were taken by Edwin Smith fifty years ago while on a visit with his wife, Olive Cook, to the Cotswolds. Smith, who died in 1971, was one of the United Kingdom's foremost landscape and architectural photographers. Olive Cook was working on the text to accompany the photographs when she died in 2002. She had made the final choices of the photographs and had arranged them in the order in which she had wanted them. Her work was taken up by Shawn Kholucy and Rory Young, who visited each site and noted the changes to the buildings and landscapes. The book concludes with a bibliography of the books written by Edwin Smith and Olive Cook."

Norman Scarfe, review in Parenthesis 12: "What is most astonishing and consoling to the readers in 2005 of A View of the Cotswolds is that her young faithful friends, the admirable contributors to this lovely book of Edwin's Views dare to 'hope that in another fifty years all these fifty Cotswold sites will still be as easily identifiable as they are today.' The photographs, like the Views themselves, are of course superb, and beautifully printed and presented.

"Not that the Views remain quite the same as in the 1950s: 'Not only are there more horseshoes on those cottages now than when working horses were commonplace, but they sit beside burglar-alarm boxes; the way of living, working and thinking is divorced from that of two generations ago.' The observers go further, noting that 'the practiced eye of the craftsman, developed by tutelage and deep familiarity with a limited palette, has closed.'"

A visual record from the 1950s of this celebrated section of rural England.

Deluxe: Bound in half-leather binding with printed paper boards. Includes separate portfolio in quarter cloth and paper boards which contains two prints made from the original negatives. Slipcased.

$510 (One copy)

Whittington Press Out of Print Titles:
• Britten's Aldeburgh
• Busy as a Bee
• Gwenda Morgan: The Diary of a Land Girl
• Fine Papers at the Oxford University Press
• Matrix 6
• Matrix 9
• Matrix 14
• Matrix 18
• Matrix 21: A Review for Printers & Bibliophiles
• Matrix 22
• Matrix 24 deluxe
• Matrix 24 standard
• Matrix 25
• Mattioli’s Herbal
• The wood engravings of John O’Connor