The Faerie queene disposed into twelue bookes fashioning XII. morall vertues.
Chelsea: The Ashendene Press, 1923.
Folio (overall 436 x 313 mm, the pages 430 x 300 mm), bound in eights (and thus actually close to Antiquarian octavo). One of 180 unnumbered copies on paper (in addition to 12 on vellum). Original quarter deep brown calf and vellum over wooden boards by W.H. Smith & Son Ltd., its gilt stamp on lower rear dentelle, spine in six compartments with gilt lettering, all edges uncut, in original felt-lined linen-covered slipcase. Collates [4 ll.], 2 ll. (title and contents), pp. 1-406, 1 l. (colophon and printer's device recto), [4 ll.]. Printed in red, blue and black in double columns on mould-made Batchelor paper; profusion of colored initial letters. Rubbing on joints and small chips in top two raised bands at front joint professionally restored, two nicks and superficial 5 cm scuff on lower cover, usual offsetting of dentelles onto extreme margins of free endpapers, faint reciprocal offsetting of black type between p. 406 and colophon page, some surface soiling and frayed threads on slipcase, else fine.
The Faerie queene is "[t]he masterpiece among Ashendene folios, without illustration or decoration except for Hewitt's initials and color printing." (Franklin, infra, p. 241.) The colophon informs that the printing by C.H. St J. Hornby, assisted by I. Jenkins, compositor, and G. Faulkner, pressman, occupied the 22 months from January 1922 to November 1923, and that the text is, with minor alterations, that edited for the Oxford University Press by J.C. Smith, based upon a collation of the quartos of 1590 and 1596 and the folio of 1609.
The Faerie queene is set in two columns of Ashendene's proprietary Subiaco type, adapted by Emery Walker and Sir Sidney Cockerell from the first type used in Subiaco by Konrad Sweynheym and Arnold Pannartz in three books of 1465. The large letters in red and blue opening each canto were designed by Graily Hewitt. The paper was commissioned from Joseph Batchelor & Sons (the paper-maker favored by William Morris) in the largest size then available, with the Ashendene roundel watermark centering a new "knight in armor" design.
For the Ashendene Press, "beauty consists in a combination of fine type, good composition, good presswork, good paper and well proportioned margins, with here and there a not too lavish use of red [and, as here, blue] for initials and headings." (Franklin, p. 144.) Cockerell, his preference converting from the decorativeness of Morris to the typographical excellence of the Faerie queene, liked the book "the better for its having no pictures." (Franklin, p. 143.) Franklin himself considered it "... impeccable, the Ashendene Faerie queene.... It's perfection in printing." (Franklin, p. 217.)
C.H.S.J. Hornby, The Ashendene Press (1939), XXXII; Colin Franklin, The Ashendene Press (1986), pp. 103, 143-146, 240-241.
Provenance: David and Lulu Borowitz (discreet bookplate upper left front pastedown); Richard M. Estes.
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