ESSEX HOUSE PRESS: GOLDSMITH, Oliver.

Inquire · Offered by Peter Harrington

The Deserted Village. First Essex House Press edition, number 119 of 150 copies only, printed on vellum and hand illuminated. Goldsmith's poem, first published in 1770, is a pastoral elegy and political polemic which depicts an idealised, and supposedly lost, rural lifestyle. It is presented here as the twelfth work in the Essex House Press Great Poems Series. The Essex House Press was founded by Charles Robert Ashbee and Laurence Hodson following the closure of William Morris's Kelmscott Press in 1897 and "came from the heart of the arts and crafts movement" (Franklin, p. 64). Ashbee bought the Kelmscott Press's Albion printing presses after William Morris's death, and employed one of the Kelmscott compositors, Thomas Binning. In 1902 "a bindery was established in the Guild, under the direction of Annie Power, who had been a student of Douglas Cockerell" (Crawford, p. 400). Power provided the illuminated letters for this work, alongside Florence Kingsford Cockerell (1871-1949), one of the leading book illuminators of the English Arts and Crafts Movement, who studied calligraphy under Edward Johnston and predominantly worked for the Ashendene Press.

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