A list of illustrators for the LEC Shakespeare

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A list of illustrators for the LEC Shakespeare

1WildcatJF
Mar 28, 2012, 7:48 pm

Hey all,

Amazingly enough, I have yet to stumble onto a complete list of illustrators for the LEC Shakespeare. I know a few of you have the set, so I was hoping one of you would be kind enough to list who illustrated what for me so I can pass that information along on my blog. I'll happily credit you! :)

Thanks in advance,
Jerry

2starkimarki
Mar 29, 2012, 12:11 am

I've been meaning to get round to this for a while, as I intend to catalog them separately.
So, I volunteer, but, Jerry, it may take a day or two.

3Maretzo
Mar 29, 2012, 1:52 am

I will scan the list from a LEC bibliography tonigth and put it here.

4starkimarki
Mar 29, 2012, 7:28 am

Gosh, I'm afraid I can't match that Swiss efficiency so I shall step aside and make way.

5WildcatJF
Mar 29, 2012, 10:52 am

Thanks to you both! I appreciate it. I'll credit you for the scan when I get it up on my blog, Maretzo. :)

6Maretzo
Edited: Mar 29, 2012, 12:21 pm



Since it is not readable, I put a pdf in the dropbox, folder "ShakespeareSet".

Source is: Great and Good Books: A Bibliographical Catalogue of the Limited Editions Club, 1989. Not me! I do not want to be famous!

7WildcatJF
Mar 29, 2012, 8:01 pm

6) I need to get my Dropbox situated on my new laptop, don't I? And if you prefer, I'll merely say that a LibraryThing commentator supplied the info. Thanks again!

8Maretzo
Mar 29, 2012, 11:54 pm

You PM me your email adress, I could send the file as attachment.

9parchment
Sep 18, 2012, 2:41 am

One interesting thing is that the club planned a few illustrations by other artists but had to change because of circumstances. I have a list of those originally planned in a piece of ephemera printed before the series started.

10Bookshrimp
Edited: Sep 18, 2012, 6:08 pm

Maretzo - this is an OT question, so apologies in advance:
How did you insert a picture on to a message as you did above?
I tried posting a picture using photobucket, but it only appeared as a link - the image itself did not appear as yours did above...

11busywine
Sep 18, 2012, 6:26 pm

Hi All, just fyi, I will get a nice list up on B&V's soon, as I intend to have an article and pics on the complete set up sometime in the next month.

12WildcatJF
Edited: Sep 18, 2012, 7:52 pm

11) I'm sure it'll look better than my picture-less one!

9) Any chance you'll share that info? :)

13the_bb
Edited: Jan 28, 2022, 11:15 am

This message has been deleted by its author.

14parchment
Edited: Sep 19, 2012, 7:30 am

12/ Sure, here we go. According to a Shakespeare Commentary there were five changes in the series:

All´s Well had Gunter Böhmer planned but was illustrated by Richard Floethe.

Richard III had Edward Ardizzone planned but was illustrated by Fritz Eichenberg.

Romeo and Juliet had Pierre Falke planned but was illustrated (sic!) by Ervine Metzl.

The Taming of the Shrew had Alexis Kravtchenko planned but was illustrated by W.A. Dwiggins.

Timon of Athens had E. McKnight Kauffer planned but was illustrated by George Buday.

15starkimarki
Sep 20, 2012, 1:58 am

In fact the Richard III illustrations were done by Fritz Eichenberg as third choice - to quote from the Monthly Letter, which attracted my attention as a passionate wreck diver

" We had at fist hoped to have these illustrations from Frank Brangwyn " but " After a year had gone by, we found that he was in broken health and unable to begin the work"
"So then we approached Edward Ardizzone, an English painter who is at the present moment one of the Official War Artists. He made a series of beautiful water-colors for us. These were reproduced in Paris, by lithography and through stencils. They were finished on the seventh of June. On the fifteenth of June, M. Fernand Mourlot, the lithographer, wrote us a letter from Bordeaux. He had got out of Paris before the Germans got in and had actually, in an excess of remarkable loyalty, carried with him to Bordeaux several packing cases containing the reproductions of Edward Ardizzone's water-colors. On June 16, according to his advices, he was able to ship them from Bordeaux. Despite is remarkable endeavor, the Adrizzone pictures never reached us. We can only conclude that they are at the bottom of the sea."

Which brings to mind:

O Lord! methought what pain it was to drown!
What dreadful noise of waters in mine ears!
What sights of ugly death within mine eyes!
Methoughts I saw a thousand fearful wracks;
A thousand men that fishes gnawed upon;
Wedges of gold, great anchors, heaps of pearl,
Inestimable stones, unvaluèd jewels,
All scatt'red in the bottom of the sea:
Some lay in dead men's skulls, and in the holes
Where eyes did once inhabit, there were crept
(As 'twere in scorn of eyes) reflecting gems,
That wooed the slimy bottom of the deep
And mocked the dead bones that lay scatt'red by.

16Maretzo
Edited: Sep 20, 2012, 6:10 am

>10 Bookshrimp:

Sorry for being late, go to the following link and to the bottom of the page:

http://www.librarything.com/wiki/index.php/Talk_and_Groups

17featherwate
Edited: Sep 20, 2012, 6:25 am

This message has been deleted by its author.

18featherwate
Jun 14, 2013, 5:15 pm

>13 the_bb: I'm not sure of the exact context in which the little insert "New Editions, Fine & Otherwise" accompanied some LEC volumes, but I can tell you a bit about the background to it.

New Editions, Fine & Otherwise was the name of a column that first appeared in the New York Times Book Review Section on Sunday, 15th September 1935, with a note to say that:
This department will henceforward be a regular feature of the Book Review. It will appear, for the present at least, on alternate Sundays.
(To digress: 'Henceforward' ! I love it! Nobody writes like that today, more's the pity.)
It was the work of Edward Larocque Tinker (1881-1968), a well-known biographer, bibliographer, philanthropist, literary critic, book designer and illustrator (he wrote a somewhat combative biography called Lafcadio Hearn's American Days, designed it handsomely and illustrated it with his own woodcuts in a pleasingly primitive style - intentionally primitive, I assume). He married into Washington society but was a born-and-bred New Yorker with an apartment on Fifth Avenue. His remit, for which he was clearly technically well qualified, was to look at new editions of old works. In his first article he spotted that the great Carl P. Rollins, whom he greatly admired, had printed one small 'printer's flower' decoration the wrong way round on a title-page (with admirers like that, who needs enemies!) and gave a mixed welcome to the arrival in New York of the Peter Pauper Press. He found their Salome disagreeably William-Morris-y (although I'm fairly certain William Morris would never, ever have boxed a text 'in a rule of red dots keyed in color to the nipple of Salome's left breast'). He didn't much like the 'lurid' Salome Valenti Angelo did for the Grabhorn Press, either, nor Angelo's LEC Rubaiyat.
The column ran from 1935 until at least March 1942, meaning Tinker was in on the birth of the Heritage Press and also reviewed a number of LECs. He never minced his words. So alternate Sundays must have been uneasily awaited in the households of Macy and his co-workers! Tinker hated Covarrubias's Green Mansion pictures, thought Carla Petrina's South Wind drawings imaginative but boneless, and called the Heritage Pickwick Papers outwardly drab and poorly served by Gordon Ross's pastel illustrations. Angelo came back in favour for his Shakespeare Sonnets (having just received it, I entirely agree!) and his Kasidah, but fell out of it again for his Song of Solomon. Bruce Rogers's LEC Poems was called a superlative edition, W A Dwiggins was 'not at his best' in The Scarlet Letter, but the LEC Pilgrim's Progress and The Flowering of New England were outstanding. John Austen was damned for his David Copperfield, praised for The Frogs, found too delicate for Peregrine Pickle, but held to have done excellent work on The Vicar of Wakefield and Gil Blas.
In general Larocque Tinker saw the Macy companies as a good thing, and on 28th May 1939 opened his column with an unusually effusive paean of (almost) unreserved praise for the beneficial effects of the LEC and the Heritage Club.
His columns usually make interesting reading, not only when Heritage and the LEC are mentioned.

19Django6924
Jun 14, 2013, 9:57 pm

>18 featherwate:

featherwate, I think Mr. Tinker protests too much in general, though I basically agree on his assessment of The Scarlet Letter, The Frogs, THe Pilgrim's Progress and The Flowering of New England. I am in total agreement with his, and your, opinion that the Valenti Angelo-illustrated Shakespeare Sonnets for the Heritage Press are nonpareil.

I haven't read--or even heard of Mr. Tinker's book on Lafcadio Hearn, but I'd like to get a copy, as I find Mr. Hearn a remarkable, but somewhat enigmatic character.

20featherwate
Jun 16, 2013, 11:14 am

>19 Django6924: Don't newspaper editors at all levels tend to hire lead critics, columnists and reviewers who are sufficiently opinionated for their views to upset some of their readers some of the time? Controversy never hurts sales! At the top end of the market, which I guess the NYT was (and perhaps still is - I know it only through searching its pre-WW2 archives), the editors would also be looking for someone who was knowledgeable and not just outspoken. I think Larocque Tinker fulfilled that role: informative, waspish, supremely self-confident and not above reminding publishers and printers that he wasn't about to let them get away with anything (that sly dig at Carl Rollins in his very first column) - if his life had been filmed, Hollywood would have signed up Clifton Webb for the lead.
I certainly don't agree with all his views (he couldn't stand John Donne) but I have some sympathy with him. There seems to have been more than enough highly-coloured illustrated Rubaiyats, Salomes and Rimes around to surfeit even the most ardent reviewer's appetite. Perhaps as a wood engraver himself he wasn't enamoured of bright colours - he thought the 'chromo-like quality and hard realism' of Arthur Szyk's illustrations for the Heritage Club Rubaiyat were 'unpleasantly reminiscent of a New Year's calendar'. It's heresy, I know, but I also find some of Szyk bordering on kitsch.
But what an incestuous world Mr T lived in! While he was still writing New Editions, Fine & Otherwise, he was an editorial colleague of Rollins and Dwiggins on The Dolphin, which was published by George Macy, distributed by the LEC, and printed by The Golden Cross Press (owner: Valenti Angelo)...

And, of course (but I've only just remembered), as an authority on Hearn and New Orleans life, architecture, cooking and (according to George Macy) women, he persuaded the LEC to publish Old Creole Days, for which he wrote the prologue.

21aaronpepperdine
Jun 16, 2013, 11:21 am

I'm a year late, but in case anyone can't access dropbox, the whole list is copied below (credit to http://thebookblog.com/article/limited-editions-club-comedies-histories-and-trag...

All’s Well That Ends Well. Drawings in color by Richard Floethe (originally to be illustrated by Gunter Böhmer), printed in colors by A. Colish, 120 pages.

Anthony and Cleopatra. Colored wood-engravings by Enric-Cristobal Ricart, pulled by R. & R. Clark and hand-colored by jean Saudé, 144 pages.

As You Like It. Watercolors by Sylvain Sauvage, lithographed in three colors and hand-colored by Mourlot Frères, 112 pages.

The Comedy of Errors. Colored wood-engravings by John Austen, printed in five colors by R. & R. Clark, 82 pages.

Coriolanus. Tempera paintings by C. Pál Molnár, lithographed (using up to fifteen colors) by Mourlot Frères, 148 pages.

Cymbeline. Lithographs by Yngve Berg, pulled by the Curwen Press, 148 pages.

Hamlet. Dry-brush drawings by Edy Legrand, printed in collotype, black and gray, by Georges Duval, 158 pages.

Henry the Fourth, Part I. Color lithographs by Barnett Freedman, pulled by the Curwen Press, 126 pages.
Henry the Fourth, Part II. Water-colors by Edward Bawden, printed in collotype by Georges Duval and hand-colored by Jean Saudé, 132 pages.

Henry the Fifth. Pencil drawings by Vera Willoughby, lithographed by Mourlot Frères, 130 pages.

Henry the Sixth, Part I. Lithographs by Graham Sutherland, pulled by the Curwen Press, 118 pages.

Henry the Sixth, Part II. Lithographs by Carlotta Petrina, pulled by George C. Miller, 130 pages.

Henry the Sixth, Part III. Colored line drawings by Jean Charlot, printed in three colors by A. Colish, 124 pages.

Henry the Eight. Wood-engravings by Eric Gill, pulled by R. & R. Clark, 136 pages.

Julius Caesar. Wood-engravings by Frans Masereel, pulled by A. Colish, 110 pages.

King John. Line drawings in three colors and gold by Valenti Angelo, printed by A. Colish, 110 pages.

King Lear. Brush drawings by Boardman Robinson, printed in collotype in black and two grays by Georges Duval, 142 pages.

Love’s Labour’s Lost. Crayon and wash drawings by Mariette Lydis, printed in collotype in black and gray by Georges Duval, 114 pages.

Macbeth. Color drawings by Gordon Craig, lithographed by Mourlot Frères, 106 pages.

Measure for Measure. Color lithographs by Hugo Steiner-Prag, pulled by Mourlot Frères, 118 pages.

The Merchant of Venice. Water-colors by René ben Sussan, printed with two colors in collotype by Georges Duval, Paris, and three colors in lithography by Mourlot Frères and hand-colored
by Maurice Beaufumé, 110 pages.

The Merry Wives of Windsor. Color drawings by Gordon Ross, printed in collotype in black and sanguine by Georges Duval and hand-colored, 114 pages.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Water-colors by Arthur Rackham, lithographed in four colors by Mourlot Frères and hand-colored by Maurice Beaufumé, 94 pages.

Much Ado About Nothing. Water-colors by Fritz Kredel, printed in collotype by Georges Duval and hand-colored by Jean Saudé, 108 pages.

Othello. Wood-engravings by Robert Gibbings, pulled by A. Colish, 140 pages.

Pericles, Prince of Tyre. Wood-engravings by Stanislas Ostoja-Chrostowski, pulled by R. & R. Clark, 140 pages.

Richard the Second. Wood-engravings by Agnes Miller Parker, pulled by A. Colish, 118 pages.

Richard the Third. Lithographs by Fritz Eichenberg (originally to be illustrated by Edward Ardizzone), pulled by George C. Miller, 150 pages.

Romeo and Juliet. Line drawings in color by Ervine Metzl (originally to be illustrated by Pierre Falke), printed in two colors by A. Colish, 126 pages.

The Taming of the Shrew. Line drawings by W.A. Dwiggins (originally to be illustrated by Alexis Kravtchenko), printed in sanguine by A. Colish, 110 pages.

The Tempest. Water-colors by Edward A. Wilson, printed in collotype (key black) by Georges Duval and in lithography (two basic colors) by Mourlot Frères and hand-colored by Maurice Beaufumé, 98 pages.

Timon of Athens. Wood-engravings by George Buday (originally to be illustrated by E. McKnight Kauffer), pulled by A. Colish, 106 pages.

Titus Andronicus. Water-colors by Nikolai Fyodorovitch Lapshin, lithographed by Mourlot Frères, 110 pages.

Troilus and Cressida. Wood-engravings by Demetrius Galanis, pulled in black and terra-cotta by Dehon et Cie, 140 pages.

Twelfth Night, or What You Will. Water-colors by Francesco Carnevali, lithographed by Mourlot Frères, 106 pages.

The Two Gentlemen of Verona. Water-colors by Pierre Brissaud, printed in collotype (key gray) by Georges Duval and hand-colored, 98 pages.

The Winter’s Tale. Drawings by Albert Rutherston, hand-colored, printed (key black) by the Curwen Press and hand-colored by Jean Saudé, 132 pages.

22WildcatJF
Jun 16, 2013, 11:32 am

21) Good to see I'm not the only one who put up that information. ;) I realize now I forgot to link it here! XD

Regardless, it's nice to have it here in a textual format as well. Thanks!

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