Nonesuch Press

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Nonesuch Press was a bibliophile book publisher founded in London in 1922 by Francis Meynell, his wife Vera Mendel and David Garnett .

history

The name of the printing house is derived from Nonsuch Palace , a Tudor palace built under King Henry VIII in Surrey (1538 to 1682/83). The first book that was published by Nonesuch Press, were the Love Poems of John Donne in May 1923. Overall, there appeared over 140 books. The publishing house had its heyday in the 1920s and 1930s, but it lasted until the mid-1960s. In the late 1930s and 1940s, Meynell left the printing company to George Macy, the founder and owner of the Limited Editions Club. In the early 1950s, Meynell teamed up with Max Reinhardt, owner of the publishing house The Bodley Head , and took over the business again. In the last years of its existence, Nonesuch Press also produced classic children's books , such as E. Nesbit's The Story of the Treasure Seekers or the fairy tale collections by Andrew Lang , which was published in the Cygnet series.

What was unusual about Nonesuch Press was that, although the books were customized using a hand-operated printing press , the final production was carried out by commercial printers such as Kynoch Press in Birmingham . The reason, of course, was to make high-quality books available to a wide audience at moderate prices. Excellently designed and produced books should not be a monopoly of private printers of the book art movement and should be committed to the hand-printing model of William Morris ' Kelmscott Press ; Meynell wanted to prove that top-quality products could also be made with machines. For the decoration of the works, Nonesuch Press worked with well-known book illustrators such as Edward McKnight Kauffer or Eric Ravilious .

Some of the best-known editions of Nonesuch Press were the collected works of playwrights William Congreve and William Wycherley , as well as translations by Cervantes and Dante .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ The McCune Collection: Nonesuch Press. Retrieved July 13, 2009 .