A Short and Beautiful Life: The Books, Writers and Artists who made the Shakespeare Head Press

(Hardback)

Publishing Details

Classifications

Physical Properties

Description

Few have heard of the Shakespeare Head Press, although it ranks alongside William Morriss Kelmscott, Emery Walker and Cobden-Sandersons Doves, Eric Gills Golden Cockerel and St John Hornbys Ashendene. Its origins date to the 1860s, when a young Arthur Henry Bullen, dreamt of printing the whole of Shakespeare. Making his dream a reality, Bullen founded the Shakespeare Head Press in 1904 in an old Tudor house, where Shakespeare would have been a guest. There are many backstories associated with the Shakespeare Head Press and of the perennial dashed hopes of small presses, which plagued Bullen. When the Press passed to Basil Blackwell (1921), Bullens mantle was assumed by the scholar-printer Bernard Newdigate. For twenty years, he produced a series of finely printed books, yet these were not commercially successful. Blackwell blamed the commodification of literature, and the metamorphoses of books from handcrafted works of art to manufactured objects. A Short and Beautiful Life reconstructs the lives of Bernard Newdigate and A.H. Bullen, and that of the Shakespeare Head Press. For Sir Basil Blackwell, the exact record of events was secondary to the universal truths it served to illustrate. And there is something remarkably contemporary about them.

Author Bio

Rita Ricketts gives prominence in her writing and research of neglected stories. She has been published in the UK, New Zealand, and the US and is a regular commentator in the New Zealand media. Currentlya visiting Bodleian Blackwell Fellow, she was one of the recipients of the 2022 European Womens Leadership Award. Her time is divided between the UK and NZ, where she tries to combine her work with entertaining a tribe of grandchildren.