Byways among English books / by Cyril Davenport.

  • Cyril James Humphries Davenport
Date:
1927
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Byways among English books / by Cyril Davenport. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    158/226 (page 134)
    Edmund Evans has made for himself and his firm a reputation that is quite likely to be of a lasting nature. His dainty work done after Kate Greenaway’s delightful pictures of children could not be equalled by any other process, and these and any other books illustrated by him in colour are always worth collecting on their own merits. Walter Crane’s illustrations to the old fairy tales, printed in colour by Evans, are full of interest and beauty especially The Yellow Dwarf, indeed, children’s books, if well illus¬ trated, make a very good subject for collection. I have seen a very effective chimney-piece ornament made by a series of Walter Crane’s designs for fairy tales, printed by Evans, each plate separately framed close along the edges and then all framed side by side closely together in one long frame the same length as the mantelpiece. A very fine plate of an illuminated manuscript was made recently by Evans as a frontispiece for one of the Burlington Fine Arts Club’s catalogues, and he also did some excellent work for the Anglo-Saxon Review. An interesting example of the use of modern processes in effective combination with older methods can be seen in the colour plates in my book on Cameos, published by Seeley & Co. in 1900. Here the extremely fine plates are in ordinary half-tone, and the colour is superimposed by means of colour wood blocks, by Edmund Evans (son of the founder of the firm) “ of the Racquet Court Press.” In many of the ordinary colour prints done by the block system the outline is done by lithography, and not engraved on wood. A curious method for using flat objects to make plates themselves from which paper impressions could be drawn was perfected by Alois Auer at Vienna in 1853. It was a reintroduction of an old process by which impressions on soft lead were made by pressure, but although this