Victorian Book Design and Colour Printing

xvi, 182pp, [64]pp of plates, [8] pp colour plates. Red cloth-covered boards with gilt titles to spine (boards very slightly rounded at corners). Internally neat, clean, bright and tight. There is a previous owner’s bookplate on the front paste down and a small pencil note on the front free endpaper. In its original, slightly shelf worn, dust jacket (slightly bumped at edges and at ends of lightly sunned spine). The blurb reads “he nineteenth century is a fascinating period both in book design and in the history of printing, and has never before been comprehensively described. At the beginning of the period British books were the best in the world for typography, paper, illustration and binding, and they were still produced in small quantities entirely by hand. Mr McLean describes how the appearance of books slowly altered as the demand for them increased throughout the century. He gives the first accurate documentation of the introduction of colour printing by chromolithography and wood blocks, based partly on research in surviving publishers’ and printers’ records, hitherto unpublished. Typography and publishers’ binding designs are also fully described and illustrated. The period ends with the supersession of the old hand crafts of chromolithography and wood-block printing by photographic methods in the 1880s and ’90s and with the founding of the Kelmscott Press in 1890, which was the starting point of Mr McLean’s ‘Modern Book Design’. Ruari McLean is the author of Modern Book Design and of monographs on George Cruikshank and Joan Hassall. He is founder editor of Motif, a magazine of the visual arts, Art Editor of The Connoisseur, and well known as a designer of books, magazines and industrial literature.” Small 8vo.