25/9/15. A natural consequence of turning the blog into a Website is that no-one (it seems!) wants to leave a Comment, because visitors who followed it every day last year no longer have a reason for looking in, and casual viewers now (of whom there are a decent number from all over the world) don’t, presumably, feel they know enough to ‘opinionate’. The casual viewers, incidentally, have usually just zoomed in for a post that has something
on their Google search term, e.g. Chekhov translations, Tahiti, Rabindranath Tagore, Michel Fokine or the Third Battle of Krithia.
I had hoped that by taking down my own brief response to Clare Hopkins’s superbly provocative last Comment top right I might encourage other people to weigh in. And everyone is still welcome and encouraged to do that! However, I appreciate that Clare’s Comment does draw on the whole gamut of last year’s posts — is very comprehensive — so people zooming in and out may not feel they are qualified to Comment on it… Personally, I don’t think that should put anyone off, but I know from their emails that many loyal ‘Calderonians’ also feel they have no more to say.
So I am going to leave the hall in other people’s courts for another week, before I attempt a reply to Clare myself, which she has certainly earned. The reply should be comprehensive, of course. It will be just like old times! Depending on what happens after that, I may ask my blogmaster to ‘archive’ the Comments so that viewers can read them all.
I think we have more or less exhausted the subject of what the device stands for that Kittie designed for the Arts and Crafts covers of Percy Lubbock’s George Calderon: A Sketch from Memory and George’s selected works, but I think it is so attractive that I am going to leave it here a bit longer. It will then join our Gallery at the right. A close inspection indicates, incidentally, that the gold really contains gold.
I am glad to report that the writing of the penultimate chapter of my biography of George, ‘Aftermath and Masterpiece’ [Kittie 1915-22] is going very well. I am hopeful that readers will have benefited from my difficulties with ‘chronotopia’, which gave me much longer to think about this chapter before writing it than would have been the case had I not been running the blog. I believe I have a far better understanding of Kittie’s life after 4 June
1915 than I would have had otherwise.
I always have four or five approaches to publishers in the air, hut if you have any ideas about plausible publishers yourself, please don’t hesitate to email them me through my Website http://patrickmiles.co.uk. Thank you for reading!
Dear Mr Miles,
It seems I am one of those drop-in viewers you describe so well, but I will endeavour to opinionate gently if I may.
I am an admirer of the bindings of Sybil Pye, and stumbled across your very interesting website. According to Pye’s Notebooks, transcribed by Marianne Tidcombe in ‘Women Bookbinders 1880-1920’, she bound four copies of Calderon’s ‘The Fountain; The Little Stone House’, described thus: “Four copies, two brown goatskin, one black goatskin, one blue pigskin, blind- and gold tooling. Bound 1918-1919. Mrs Calderon”. Bloomsbury Book Auctions in November 1996 listed a copy bound by Pye in purple morocco, and describes the circles and wheat motif as its design. In a letter to Thomas Sturge Moore in 1925, Pye wrote that she had “only finished 9 out of the 13 little books I promised Mrs Calderon! However the end of that is in sight now, & I have learnt a good deal from it”. I have unfortunately not been able to track down these volumes.
Additionally, Pye first used the circles and wheat motif on a binding in 1913, for a copy of Michael Field’s ‘World at Auction’ – it is currently held at the Harry Ransom Centre, University of Texas, and was reproduced in Apollo Magazine in 1925. It is used three times as part of a larger design, and is identical to the one featured on the Calderon bindings published by Grant Richards, except for each of the initials – in their place is a larger dot. The wheat tool was originally designed & used by Charles Ricketts, and later given to Pye.
Apologies if any of this is already known to you. If you have any additional information on Sybil Pye, especially details of her leather bindings for Mrs Calderon (none of which I have seen), I would be most interested.
Very kind regards,
Paul
Dear Paul,
Thank you very much indeed for your interest and this extremely informative Comment.
Yes, I had read Marianne Tidcombe on Sybil Pye, and like you wondered what had happened to the books she bound for Kittie Calderon. I have never seen any of them. None of them featured in the Calderons’ extant library. I see that I had added in red on my notes to Tidcombe: ‘One of these given to A.B. Lowry 1920.’ If my memory serves me, I took this information from a letter of thanks to Kittie from A.B. Lowry, who was an old university friend of George’s. Underneath the entry for these four copies in Tidcombe’s list of Pye’s bindings is another one referring to Kittie’s commission to bind H.C. Bradby’s Memorial Sonnets. Bradby was a friend of George’s from Rugby, and a housemaster there, so perhaps that copy went into Rugby’s library or the extensive Bradby family.
As you will have realised, I assumed Kittie had designed the cover motif herself, as she was a trained artist, so it is a revelation to me that the tool was originally designed by Charles Ricketts, whom the Calderons knew, I think. Even so, of course, Kittie has adapted it. Also, it is interesting that it is known as a ‘wheat’ tool, as to me it looks more like barley, that is how Percy Lubbock (Kittie’s go-between with Pye) referred to it, and as you would see from pp. 423-24 of my biography (www.samandsam.co.uk), her choice of motif was most likely influenced by the Irish ballad ‘The Wind that Shakes the Barley’.
Fascinating!
All best wishes,
Patrick