Eros and Psyche : a poem in XII measures / by Robert Bridges: ; with wood-cuts from designs by Edward Burne-Jones.
Robert Seymour Bridges (1844-1930)
Category
Books
Date
1935
Materials
Place of origin
Newtown
Order this imageCollection
Anglesey Abbey, Cambridgeshire
NT 3101195
Summary
Robert Bridges, Eros and Psyche, Gregynog Press, 1935. Binding: Gilt-tooled white pigskin, 1935, by the Gregynog bindery, with finishing by John Ewart Bowen (1915–2004).
Full description
The Gregynog Press was funded in 1922 at Gregynog Hall, a mock-Tudor mansion in Montgomeryshire. The Hall had been bought two years earlier by Gwendoline and Margaret Davies, two sisters whose considerable wealth had come from their grandfather's work in railways and coal mines. Their plan was a high-minded one, typical of the time: the Hall was to become a craft centre for ex-servicemen and others affected by the First World War; there was to be weaving and pottery, printing and music. In the event the pottery and weaving were never established and Gregynog became almost exclusively a centre for book-making, with music festivals in the summer at which Ralph Vaughan Williams conducted and for which Gustav Holst composed music. The press was unusual among private presses, in that its owners took no direct hand in its operation but governed it through a board of directors. This frequently resulted in friction with the artists and craftsmen who were employed to do the actual printing and decoration of the books. Towards the end of the press’s period of operation, in 1940, Thomas Jones, Cabinet Secretary and chairman of the board, lamented that they had managed to part on good terms with only one of their senior staff. By the mid-1930s the press was on its third 'controller', the American Loyd Haberly (1896-1981). Haberly was the only one of the Gregynog controllers with previous experience of printing. He had previously built and run the Seven Acres Press at Long Crendon in Buckinghamshire, on which he had printed volumes of his own verse. As a young man he had met Robert Bridges and the veteran poet, some of whose early works had been printed by the private Daniel Press in Oxford, had expressed the hope that his ‘Eros and Psyche’ (1885) would one day be printed with the woodcuts which Edward Burne-Jones had devised for William Morris's ‘The Earthly Paradise’. Morris had conceived the scheme for his long poem around 1865. It was to be printed in a large folio volume with high-quality typography and Burne-Jones’s illustrations. The artist made designs for the ‘Cupid and Psyche’ episode of the poem, founding his style on woodcuts in early printed books, and Morris and others cut wood-blocks from them. Prototype pages, however, were unsatisfactory. It was a quarter of a century before Morris founded the Kelmscott Press, and even the best typography of the period could not produce a good effect with the robust lines of the woodcuts that Burne-Jones and Morris had produced. When ‘The Earthly Paradise’ was published between 1868 and 1870, it was in a conventionally produced edition without illustrations. When Haberly was appointed controller at Gregynog, he decided to produce a book in which the Burne-Jones woodcuts would be combined with Bridges's verse as the poet had proposed. The original woodblocks were not available, so new ones had to be made from tracings held by the Ruskin School of Drawing in Oxford. For the type Haberly went back much further, selecting one modelled on that used in the 1472 Foligno edition of Dante's ‘La divina commedia’. This, the only type devised for Gregynog, was designed by the calligrapher Graily Hewitt (1864-1952), who also provided the initials used in the book. The result was not generally well received; the type was thought eccentric and too heavy for the illustrations, which themselves seemed somewhat anaemic compared to the originals. We can imagine, however, that their discreet eroticism might have appealed to a collector of Etty nudes such as Lord Fairhaven. Morris's woodblocks were bequeathed to the Society of Antiquaries of London by May Morris in 1940, and were finally used to print an edition of Morris's Cupid and Psyche by the Rampant Lions Press in 1974, when they found their perfect match in Morris's own Troy type. Text adapted from William Hale's entry in ‘Treasures from Lord Fairhaven’s Library at Anglesey Abbey’, National Trust, 2013, cat. 49, pp. 148-51.
Bibliographic description
[4], 141, [3] p., [2] leaves of plates : ill. ; 4to. Provenance: Twentieth-century armorial bookplate (large variant), signed Badeley 1930: Urban Huttleston Rogers Lord Fairhaven [i.e.: Urban Huttleston Broughton , 1st Lord Fairhaven (1896-1966)]. Price in pencil on front pastedown: £5-10-. Binding: Twentieth-century full vellum over boards; gilt decorative centrepiece on upper board; gilt fillets on spine bands; gilt spine title 'Eros and Psyche'; gilt top edge.
Provenance
Acquired by Huttleston Rogers Broughton, 1st Lord Fairhaven (1896-1966) and then bequeathed by him to the National Trust with the house and the rest of the contents in 1966.
Makers and roles
Robert Seymour Bridges (1844-1930), author Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones (Birmingham 1833 - London 1898) , illustrator Graily Hewitt (1828-1893), illustrator
References
Mark Purcell, William Hale and David Person, Treasures from Lord Fairhaven’s Library at Anglesey Abbey, Swindon: National Trust; London: Scala Arts & Heritage Publishers, 2013., pp.148-51