A. Colish "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland"

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A. Colish "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland"

1aaronpepperdine
Bearbeitet: Apr. 20, 2016, 3:10 pm

Any LEC collector will of course be familiar with the press of A. Colish, which printed many of the club's books. In 1983, they also produced this lovely little edition of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, with the John Tenniel illustrations. There were 975 copies, and it can be found relatively cheaply.











2kermaier
Apr. 20, 2016, 5:13 pm

Lovely! And it looks a bit more wieldly in the hand than the Pennyroyal Press Alice (though the Barry Moser illustrations are amazing). I think I will buy a copy of this -- thanks for the enablement!

3aaronpepperdine
Apr. 20, 2016, 6:10 pm

The Pennyroyal Alice has been at the top of my wish list for years, but you are right - this one is quite easy to hold!

4kermaier
Apr. 21, 2016, 1:13 am

>3 aaronpepperdine:
Well, I only have the California Deluxe editions of the Pennyroyal Alice and TTLG -- the originals are out of my price range, alas!

5featherwate
Apr. 21, 2016, 5:05 am

>1 aaronpepperdine:
Colish could hardly have come up with a better advertisement for their skills than this - the floral binding is a delight and the typography and paper make for a fine and legible text.

Somewhere I've got the Peter Pauper Press set of the two Alices - I wouldn't put them on a par with this one but they are an attractive pair. They, too, were printed at Mount Vernon - was this town/area the omphalos of the East Coast printing world?

6Django6924
Apr. 21, 2016, 3:26 pm

>5 featherwate:

Jack, I think Mt. Vernon is more of a spoke than the hub. New York City was the true hub, as that's where most of the design and entrepreneurial work took place--as well as most of the printing of the illustrations used in fine press books. The various printers were located in places where operating expenses were lower, such as Mt. Vernon, Manchester, New Haven, CT, and up to Massachusetts, which could make a claim to being a mini-hub since that state was the principal residence of both W.A. Dwiggins and D.B. Updike as well as being the home of The Riverside Press in its glory days when Bruce Rogers was designing for it. Brattleboro, Vermont is also close to the printers in Massachusetts, and Massachusetts was also home to the Worthy Paper Company of sainted memory.

My state, California was also a mecca for fine press work, in Los Angeles as well as San Francisco.

7astropi
Apr. 22, 2016, 11:38 am

Lovely indeed! Thanks for sharing, I love these "hidden gem" books :)

8kdweber
Apr. 22, 2016, 1:42 pm

>8 kdweber: Consider me enabled, it's on order.

9aaronpepperdine
Apr. 22, 2016, 2:20 pm

>7 astropi:, >8 kdweber:

Excellent.

For me, these "hidden gems," as Astropi puts it, are often the most fun to find and collect. Everyone knows about all the big famous private press books, and all it generally takes to acquire them is money, but there are hundreds and hundreds of these wonderful smaller productions that even the most well-heeled collector might not ever run across without specifically looking for them.

10featherwate
Apr. 22, 2016, 2:56 pm

>6 Django6924: Thank you for that useful briefing, Robert! The Imprint Society was another of the area's' respected companies.
"also home to the Worthy Paper Company of sainted memory" - and home to many other paper companies (there must be something in the water of Western Massachusetts): The Agawam Paper Company, American Writing Paper Company, Birnie Paper Company, Foley Paper Company, Holyoke Paper & Card Company, Morgan Stationery Company, New England Card & Paper Company, Package Paper & Supply Company, the Southworth Company, Springfield Glazed Paper Company, Strathmore Paper Company, and the United Manufacturing Company.
Not to mention the The Springfield Collar Company, whose salesmen, travelled as far west as Chicago and St. Louis, selling nothing but....paper collars.
The founder of Worthy has a suitably impressive memorial:


As for California, it was definitely a West Coast White House-ful of talent: Ward Ritchie, the Grabhorns , the Allens, the Bentleys' Archetype Press,...

11kdweber
Apr. 22, 2016, 5:35 pm

When did the Press of A. Colish go out of business?

12Django6924
Apr. 22, 2016, 9:36 pm

>10 featherwate: "As for California, it was definitely a West Coast White House-ful of talent: Ward Ritchie, the Grabhorns , the Allens, the Bentleys' Archetype Press,..."

...John Henry Nash, Merle Armitage, Saul and Lillian Marks' Plantin Press...

Jack, I think what was in the water was the pollutants from the paper-making process; Massachusetts was apparently less fussy about the effluvia from paper mills than other states.

13featherwate
Apr. 22, 2016, 10:04 pm

>11 kdweber:
Abraham Colish (1882-1963) founded his press in 1907 in NY City. It specialized in advertising typography but by the 1920s was also attracting work from fine press publishers. Colish moved his company out to Mount Vernon in 1955/6 and took an active part in the business until a week before his death in April 1963. Control of the company then passed to his son Louis. In 1983/4 heavy investment in state-of-the-art equipment enabled the Press four years later to celebrate its 80th anniversary by winning the contract to print 120 large colour plates for a book to accompany a major Georgia O'Keeffe exhibition at Washington's National Gallery of Art. The quality of work was widely praised and the book sold over 100,000 copies. Nonetheless, within two years he Colish Press became one of three old-line print shops to be absorbed by another long-established company, Laurel Printing of Elmsford, New York. Presumably Colish was unable, despite all its recent investment, to compete with its larger USA rivals or the many cheap overseas printers increasingly favoured by museums, fine art publishers etc. Louis Colish's age - he was in his 80s -may also have been a factor.
Bizarrely, Laurel Printing, 375 Executive Boulevard, Elmsford NY 10523-1228, now appears to be a Carrier truck company licensed for commercial over-the-road transportation services including specialized, flatbed or heavy haul driving of printed material. Its US Department of Transportation number is 382655. Only one of its trucks includes an auxiliary power unit.
Hope this helps.

Sources:
New York Times
freewebarcade.com
The United States Department of Transportation and NY State Department of Transportation
Scoopmonkey
The Press of A. Colish Archives, University of Delaware

14featherwate
Apr. 22, 2016, 10:52 pm

>12 Django6924:
Robert my list was intended to be indicative not comprehensive. John Henry Nash's edition of Religio Medici is one of my favourite LECs, and I find Merle Armitage the most recognizable of American book designers. Not just because his name tends to be more prominent than the author's or the title of the book, but because he seems to me to owe little or nothing to the conventions of the Old World. I have several of his books, including one with a typically flamboyant inscription to his friend Barry Goldwater.
You're right about what was in the water! From Agawam and Feeding Hills Revisited by David Cecchi (2005)

15Django6924
Bearbeitet: Apr. 23, 2016, 12:37 am

>14 featherwate:

Of course I know you weren't being a completist--it's only my chauvinism that prompted me to name other West Coast luminaries!

I am always astounded by the material you find, Jack. Did you have a previous job at MI6? I will say that I wonder about the credibility of Mr. Cecchi: he claims the Worthy Paper Mill closed in the 1930s, yet the mammoth undertaking of Gibbon's Decline and Fall was printed on Worthy Paper in 1946. It is possible that this was done on old paper stock, and true, the Monthly Letter for my 1949 Crainquebille says it is printed on Worthy paper manufactured "several years ago before the mill closed," but since so many LECs in the 1940s were printed on Worthy paper, it seems odd that stocks produced in the 1930s would have lasted throughout the shortages of the war years.

16abysswalker
Dez. 13, 2021, 2:42 pm

For anyone interested, to replace the many broken images above, I have posted a collection of photos of this book over at the Fine Press Forum group:

https://www.librarything.com/topic/337474

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