11.3.11

T. E. Lawrence & Siegfried Sassoon

Fellow handpress printer Miles Wigfield, in the U.K., recently published a T.E. Lawrence item featuring a wood engraving by Jim Westergard. Details of T. E. Lawrence and Siegfried Sassoon - A Friendship from the Reading Room Press's site:

"This was the text of the talk that Dennis Silk gave at the Imperial War Museum in 2007. The chance to put the names of two of my literary heroes together with his name on a title page was an opportunity that no self-respecting private press printer could allow to pass. The portrait illustration, engraved on boxwood by Jim Westergard, I suggested, might be the first published image of Sassoon and Lawrence together for even though Lawrence attended Sassoon's wedding no photograph of them both appears to exist. Bound by Chris Hicks, there were 120 copies. [A few remain: £30 + p&p.]"

Miles has two Albion presses and, based on the photos on his site, a pristine studio (note the cool drying rack hanging from the ceiling). The press is his avocation, and therefore proceeds at a pace that makes publishing pleasurable but never onerous. He is particularly interested in wood engravings, and like HM makes a habit of commissioning work by artists whose names may not (yet) be terribly well known among the book crowd.