he British private presses of the heroic early years took many forms. Some, like St John Hornby’s Ashendene Press, were unashamedly the spare-time indulgencies of wealthy men: Hornby was the director of the big bookselling chain of W. H. Smith. The Kelmscott Press was similar, although financially successful: William Morris was careful to see that it was not a drain on his pocket, but his own contribution as author and designer was unpaid. Other establishments, although loosely classed as private presses, were more subject to market forces. The Golden Cockerel Press, as it demonstrated on more than one occasion, was one of these.
It also differed from most of the other private presses, which were run by a single dominating figure, in that it went through three distinct phases with different owners. It began life, under Harold Midgley Taylor, as an amateurish co-operative workshop in the service of literature; then for nine years, under Robert Gibbings, it matured into one of the finest presses in a great tradition, with a skilled workforce and an unmistakable style; and then, under Christopher Sandford, the printing shop was closed down, and the Press became in effect simply a publisher, with its books printed by a trade printer.
It began operating in late 1920, taking its name from one of the works staged by the Ballets Russes. It was an idealistic venture dreamed up by Harold Taylor with his wife Gay and two of her women friends. Taylor, then in his late twenties, suffered from tuberculosis, and had a small government pension. He had been unsuccessfully trying fruit farming at Waltham St Lawrence in Berkshire, and had become possessed with the idea of printing and publishing books with a small group of like-minded workers, and sharing the proceeds generously with authors, who would also help with the printing.
At the start, Taylor acted with some energy, securing authors such as A. E. Coppard, Havelock Ellis, Richard Hughes and Peter Quennell, and a contract to print a monthly magazine, Voices, for the publishers Chapman and Hall; he made an arrangement with the booksellers Birrell and Garnett to distribute Golden Cockerel books; and he went to Ditchling to get a grounding in printing at the St Dominic’s Press. It is some indication of the unworldliness of his plans, however, that even Hilary Pepler, the leader of the Ditchling community, where the lifestyle was notoriously spartan, felt obliged to warn Gay Taylor of the discomforts ahead.
For from the beginning almost everything went wrong. The army surplus hut which Taylor had bought and assembled at Waltham St Lawrence as a combined workshop and living quarters was cold and damp; money and food were short; the inexperience of the novice printers meant that work was slow and the results poor; and the authors who came to help mostly sat around drinking tea and chatting. The contract for Voices was cancelled after the first number was delivered late; Gay Taylor’s two friends left, and were replaced by Coppard, who became her lover; and Taylor’s tuberculosis got worse (he died in 1925). The co-operative ideals of the original plan had been abandoned to the extent of bringing in some skilled employees, which meant improving the working conditions as well as paying salaries. In November 1923 the Press was advertised for sale.
David Garnett of Birrell and Garnett (who was also a director of the Nonesuch Press, then just beginning) expressed surprise that anyone should want to take on the Press, since there was ‘so little to take over’. The man who did so, Robert Gibbings, had already been commissioned by Taylor to illustrate Brantome’s The Lives of Gallant Ladies, one of the kind of lightly erotic works which was to become something of a Golden Cockerel speciality. Already at the end of the Taylor period there had been a shift towards illustrated limited editions which Gibbings was to take to such splendid heights. He made Golden Cockerel books into sumptuous showplaces for many of the wood engravers then working, not only himself but others such as Eric Ravilious, John Nash, Paul Nash, John Farleigh, Agnes Miller Parker, J. E. Laboureur, David Jones, and Eric Gill. Gill not only illustrated many titles, culminating in the Press’s masterpiece, The Four Gospels of 1931, but he also designed for it a special type.
Among the assets listed in the sale documents when Gibbings took Golden Cockerel over were three thousand pounds’ weight of Caslon Old Face. Caslon was the type customarily used by those private presses, such as the St Dominic’s Press, which focused on content, without pretentions towards ‘The Book Beautiful’, as Cobden-Sanderson of the Doves Press so loftily called it. Gibbings continued to use Caslon for the first few years of his stewardship, but as his ambitions for the look of his books grew, so did the urge to have a special Golden Cockerel roman.
The grander private presses which preceded him had all had their own types, which had ranged from the noble Doves roman to some monstrous designs such as Charles Ricketts’s Vale type. William Morris had designed his own Golden Type and both the Troy Type and Chaucer faces, as an integral part of his consciously historicist reform of book design and production standards: type design came just after good hand-made paper in his requirements for his press. Of Morris’s Kelmscott types, Golden Type was based on the fifteenth-century Venetian roman of Nicholas Jenson (though its weight was greatly strengthened, and it was given heavy, and very nineteenth-century, slab serifs), and Troy on the kind of semi-blackletter rotunda used by Morris’s favoured German printers, the Zainer brothers. a Golden Type’s Jenson model was reworked and refined in the Doves roman, the most beautiful of the early private press types. The Doves type, though lighter and more elegant than Golden Type, still had slight slab serifs, and was still some way away from Jenson.
William Morris, and more especially Sydney Cockerell, secretary to Morris and eventually his executor, had a proprietory attitude towards the Kelmscott types, and while they could not prevent overseas copying they opposed unauthorised casting by the Reed foundry, who had cast them for the Kelmscott Press. But this restrictive attitude was as nothing compared to Cobden-Sanderson’s at Doves. As the result of a bitter feud with his partner Emery Walker, he decided that no one else should be able to use the Doves type, and during the summer of 1916 he threw batches of it into the river Thames off Hammersmith Bridge.
Cobden-Sanderson’s attitude, which even the mild Walker called ‘megalomanic’, was clearly unhinged; but there remained something obsessive in the feelings of many private press owners towards their types. After all, if their aim was to improve the standards of the book trade in general, they should have welcomed free use of their designs. One has the feeling that they preferred to see themselves as solitary beacons of excellence in a world which, so long as it remained enslaved to industrial capitalism, was incapable of improvement. This was Morris’s view, and Eric Gill’s as well, although in practice the relationship which Gill developed, concurrently with his work with Gibbings, with the Monotype Corporation was very much that of a modern industrial designer. Indeed, his career as a type designer is a case study in the cross-fertilization between the worlds of the crafts and industry, to the mutual enrichment of both. Although Robert Gibbings tried to persuade Gill to design types exclusively for Golden Cockerel, he had the good sense not to insist too hard.
The Four Gospels was both the solstice and the sunset of Golden Cockerel under Gibbings. The economic depression of the early 1930s put an end to his grand ambitions, and in 1933 the Press was once again up for sale. The new buyer was a director of the Chiswick Press, Christopher Sandford, with two colleagues, Owen Rutter and Francis Newbery. They closed down the workshop at Waltham St Lawrence and moved the type to the Chiswick Press, where Golden Cockerel printing was done from then on. Gibbings continued to illustrate a few books for Sandford, but his later energies went into sculpture and into writing and illustrating a popular series of travel books, based on river journeys, with titles like Sweet Thames Run Softly and Coming down the Wye, published by Dent. He died in 1958, aged sixty eight.
At the Chiswick Press, the Golden Cockerel type was little used: for reasons of economy, Sandford used mostly Monotype setting. An exception was made in 1937 for one of the few books of the Sandford years which was on the Gibbings scale. This was an edition of Milton’s Paradise lost, set in the 18 point size which had been used in The Four Gospels. In fact Gibbings had announced such an edition, with his own engravings, in his 1930 Spring list, but in the event the illustrator was another, much inferior artist. Sandford finally relinquished control in 1959, selling the Press to the American publisher Thomas Yoseloff.
The type was put into storage in Bentall’s furniture warehouse in Kingston-on-Thames, where it remained until 1974, when the partners of the Rampant Lions Press in Cambridge, my father Will Carter and myself, were given permission by Mr Yoseloff to borrow it. In 1980 we were able to buy the 18 point and the two titlings; the 14 point, having been more frequently used, was heavily worn and of little practical use, and was scrapped, although the St Bride Printing Library took sample fonts. The patterns and matrices were given by Christopher Sandford to the Cambridge University Press archive of private press material, which is now in the University Library.
We have used the type for several books, beginning with The Psalms of David (1977), and most recently Ted Hughes’s Shakespeare’s Ovid (1995), as well as many slighter pieces, and a certain amount of jobbing work. Time has increased, rather than diminished, our partiality for the type, and we welcome ITC making it available to other typographers. Two practical limitations will no longer apply. Over the years we have struggled to overcome our holding of the type in only one text size, and that without an italic, by using Perpetua for smaller sizes, and occasionally (and I hope Hermann Zapf will forgive us for this) Palatino italic as an auxiliary font. One drawback in the titlings has proved insuperable. Robert Gibbings, as will be seen by looking at his books with a critical eye, did not believe in letter-spacing his capitals evenly. Consequently, he had the QU ligature in the titlings cast as a single sort which does not permit spacing out. There is no separate letter Q. As we do letter-space our capitals, we try to avoid jobs which require the QU combination. This does not, however, lessen our admiration for the titlings, particularly the 36 point, which is one of Gill¼s most beautiful designs. It has been especially well translated in the ITC version, and of course its users in its new digital form can now space sensitively the words often used by William Caslon and other founders in their specimen sheets, QUOUSQUE TANDEM . . .
Sebastian Carter printed his first book at the Rampant Lions Press at the age of twelve, is the author of Twentieth Century Type Designers, and has contributed articles to fourteen consecutive issues of Matrix.
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