Ashendene Press

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The Ashendene Press was an English private book printing company founded in 1894 by Charles Harry St. John Hornby (1867-1946) and which existed until 1935.

history

Hornby named his print shop after his birthplace Ashendene, Bayford, Hertshire, where he was born on June 25, 1867 to Reverend Charles Edward Hornby and Harriet Catherine Turton. At first he set up a hand press in his parents' house and only printed for his friends. His first book was "The journal of Joseph Hornby" (1895), a diary of his grandfather that he kept during a trip to Paris in 1815. He started under the simplest of conditions - he used borrowed types and only with the help of his brother and sisters did Hornby learn the printing trade “in the school of experience”. In Hertfordshire he printed 10 books. The press stayed there until 1899 when he moved to Shelley House in the Chelsea neighborhood of London because of his marriage.

For the printing of three poems by John Milton (1896) and for two essays by Francis Bacon : Of building and gardens (1897), only 16 copies of which were printed, Hornby used his own paper, made by Messrs. Batchelor and with has been provided with a special watermark.

The Ashendene Press existed until 1935, with interruptions from 1915 to 1920 due to the First World War . As with the other private print shops in England, Hornby's personal literary tastes and artistic preferences shaped the look and content of his books.

Along with the Kelmscott Press and the Doves Press , the Ashendene Press made a significant contribution to the English book art reform, concentrating on the traditional printing trade and producing high quality books in protest against inferior machine production. The Dante edition of the Ashendene Press, published in 1909, is comparable to the Chaucer edition of the Kelmscott Press in terms of its artistic performance and design . The editions of Le Morte D'Arthur (1913), Il Decameron (1920), Don Quixote (1927/28) and Thucydides (1930) are also among his masterpieces.

Hornby was able to win Emery Walker as a member of the press who, with the help of Sydney C. Cockerell, the former secretary of Kelmscott Press, designed the Subiaco type. For the development of the Subiaco-Type, an Antiqua , Walker oriented himself on an early type from the 15th century, which the printers Konrad Sweynheim († 1477) and Arnold Pannartz in Subiaco near Rome had used. Based on the model of the edition Cosmographia published by Ptolemäus in Ulm in 1482, printed by Lienhart Holl , a second type was developed for the Ashendene Press, the Ptolemy type .

Hornby employed well-known people such as: B. Edward Johnston , Graily Hewitt, Eric Gill , the bookbinder Katherine Adams, and Sydney Cockerell's brother, Douglas Cockerell.

In the 35 years of its existence, the Ashendene Press, in which all editions were hand-set, published 40 books.

Individual evidence

  1. ^ 'Parishes: Bayford', in: A History of the County of Hertford: Volume 3, ed. William Page (London, 1912), pp. 419-423
  2. ↑ Edward Johnston
  3. ↑ Eric Gill
  4. ↑ Ashendene Press . The Columbia Encyclopedia, 6th ed. 2014

swell

  • Michaela Braesel: The "Private Press Movement" . In: Gutenberg Museum (Hrsg.): In search of the ideal book. William Morris and the 1896 Chaucer edition of Kelmscott Press . Mainz 1996, pp. 69-70
  • Friedrich Adolf Schmidt-Künsemüller: William Morris and the newer book art . Carl Wehmer (Ed.), Contributions to Books and Libraries, Vol. 4, Wiesbaden 1955, pp. 55–58
  • Emery Walker Library

literature

  • Colin Franklin: The Ashendene Press . Dallas, Texas 1986
  • Charles Harry St. John Hornby; Cicely Hornby: A hand-list of the books printed at the Ashendene Press MDCCCXCV-MCMXXV . Ashendene Press, Shelley House, Chelsea 1925

Web links