The Four Gospels, The Four Gospels of Lord Jesus Christ according to the Authorised Version of King James I. First Edition. Waltham St. Lawrence: Golden Cockerel Press, 193.
You can view our first edition of The Four Gospels here.
Presented by Adam Douglas, Senior Specialist in Literature at Peter Harrington Rare Books.
Folio (332 x 230 mm). Original white pigskin with Gill design in gilt on front cover and title in gilt on spine, raised bands on spine, bound by Sangorski and Sutcliffe with two metal clasps, gilt edges. Custom folding box enclosed within collector’s chemise and blue morocco-backed slipcase. Printed in 18-point Golden Cockerel Face type, 65 wood-engraved illustrations by Eric Gill, 4 of which are full-page. Very minor soiling to binding, but an exceptional copy and the only known copy on vellum to carry an inscription by the illustrator.
Number 9 of 500 copies of which this is one of 12 copies printed on vellum, presentation copy inscribed by Eric Gill on the colophon, “ To Leonard Woolf and Babette N. Clayburgh”. Near neighbours in East Sussex, Gill and Woolf had developed a close friendship around the early 1930s and collaborated on a number of different projects. For the 1931 Hogarth Press edition of Vita Sackville-West’s translation of Rainer Maria Rilke’s Duineser Elegien, for example, the Woolfs approached Gill to design and cut the initials. The California socialite Babette Clayburgh (1889–1941) and her husband Herbert Eugene Clayburgh (1878–1972), a San Francisco silk magnate, were prominent book collectors. They joined the Book Club of San Francisco in 1920.
As noted in the bibliography of the Press, “this is the Golden Cockerel book usually compared with the Doves Bible and the Kelmscott Chaucer. A flower among the best products of English romantic genius, it is also surely, thanks to its illustrator, Eric Gill, the book among all books in which Roman type has been best mated with any kind of illustration”.
