VALE PRESS: BLAKE, William.

Inquire · Offered by Peter Harrington

Poetical Sketches. First Vale Press edition, one of 210 copies produced on Arnold hand-made paper.Charles Ricketts founded the Vale Press in 1896. He was an outstanding art nouveau designer who produced type and illustrations for a number of notable author's including Thomas Hardy for Tess of the d'Urbervilles (1891). He also worked as theatre designer for Oscar Wilde, Gilbert and Sullivan, and W. B. Yeats. Although influenced by the aesthetic movement and by William Morris, his Vale press books are more classical than medieval in style. The fire which destroyed his stock and decorative material in 1899 robbed him of his enthusiasm for publishing, and he closed the press with his Bibliography of the Vale Press (1904).

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