[Rarebooks] FS: C.R. Ashbee, 1908 & more Ashbee

[Joslin Hall Rare Books, ABAA]

Ashbee, C.R.  CRAFTSMANSHIP IN COMPETITIVE INDUSTRY. Being a Record of the
Workshops of the Guild of Handicraft, and some deductions from their
twenty-one years' experience.

London; Essex House Press: (1908).

One is always left, when discussing Charles Robert Ashbee's writings, with
the problem of how fully to disclose the fact that, unlike his masterful
designs in silver, his written work simply is not very good... even his
wife described him as writing "through cotton wool".  This document,
however, transcends C.R. Ashbee's stylistic limitations, as it is nothing
less than his own post-mortem of, and justification for, his life's work
-The Guild of Handicraft, written at the time that the Guild had finally
collapsed under a mountain of debts.

Here he explains what the Guild was trying to do, why they were trying to
do it, how they did it, why it did not work, and how it could be made to
work.  Here he attacks his critics and declares that the Guild and the
Arts and Crafts Movement will rise again- he dedicates the book "To those
Members of the Guild of Handicraft, who, whether working in the Guild's
shops or not, have decided to stick to it and see it through".  He further
shows his determination by placing this quote from Cecil Rhodes opposite
the Contents page-

    "If you have an Idea, and it is a good Idea,
    and you will only stick to it, you will come
    out all right in the end".

Of course, it did not come out "all right in the end" for the Guild, but
that is another story...  this book remains as Ashbee's rather polemical
but nonetheless important treatise on his work and the ideals of the Arts
and Crafts Movement.

Hardcover.  6.5"x10", 258 pages, b/w illustrations; original tan boards
and cloth spine; covers with some wear and darkening around the edges; top
corner chipped; endpapers toned, light soil. $750.00

Illustration->
<http://www.joslinhall.com/images/th-03076.jpg>


Ashbee, C.R.  MODERN ENGLISH SILVERWORK: An Essay by C.R. Ashbee, together
with a series of designs by the author drawn upon a hundred separate
lithograph plates and coloured by hand, with a descriptive index.

London; B. Weinreb: 1974.  2nd edition.  Limited to 1000 copies.

A facsimile of the limited 1909 edition, with new introductory material on
Ashbee's life, work and this book, by Alan Crawford and Shirley Bury. 
When Ashbee described the lithographs as "tinted by hand" he meant a bit
here and there -the pieces are silver so the tints are of the gemstone or
enamel inlays.  This handsome facsimile provides about 200 Ashbee designs
for silverwork produced or drawn between roughly 1890 and 1909 -Ashbee was
never much good at keeping exact records.  Added to the designs is
Ashbee's own rather polemical introduction, which was written at the time
that his beloved Guild of Handicraft had finally collapsed under a
mountain of debts.  As Shirley Bury puts it-

     "If few of his pronouncements can be accepted as
     literal truth, it is not because he deliberately
     set out to distort and deceive, but because he always
     wrote to create an effect.  In this instance, the
     Guild was in dissolution, and he had both to justify
     the past and proclaim his faith in the future".

Hardcover.  10"x12.5", xxiii + 12 pages plus 100 plates, plus 34 pages; a
little light wear, but a very nice copy.  $175.00

Illustration-.
<http://www.joslinhall.com/images/th-03075.jpg>

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JOSLIN HALL RARE BOOKS, ABAA
Fine books of the 16th-20th centuries
on the decorative and fine arts & design

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