Böcker av Rita Ricketts

Few have heard of the Shakespeare Head Press, although it ranks alongside William Morris's Kelmscott, Emery Walker and Cobden-Sanderson's Doves, Eric Gill's Golden Cockerel and St John Hornby's 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), Bullen's 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.

The Blackwell archive is a cornucopia not only of the life s work of generations of the world-famous bookselling and publishing company, but the stories of obscure yet exceptional lives. This is what makes it such a rarity and so appealing. Rita Ricketts quest began with the discovery of a letter which revealed that from about 1910-50 the head of the shop s antiquarian department, Will King, had been a prolific writer and diarist. Though lacking a formal education, his diaries provide an astonishing record of his learning through the books that passed through the shop and an insightful and poignant commentary on events in the first half of the twentieth century. Other encounters recorded by the Blackwells offer a glimpse of writers at the beginning of their careers, such as Vera Brittain, Dorothy L. Sayers, John Buchan, Wilfred Owen, Edith Sitwell, and Lawrence Binyon. They also, of course, document the everyday trials of the book trade and the determination to start a publishing company which aimed to provide books in every home. The tales drawn from the archive and collected here also include the memories of Benjamin Henry Blackwell s early apprentices and the illustrious customers and authors they served, interleaved with everyday memories and miscellanea that are so often missing from recorded history. They are of inestimable value to those interested in the history of the book and, more than that, the stories told here are a fascinating and entertaining read. "