Les Églogues de Virgile
One of only six copies of the absolute deluxe edition, printed on magnificent, sturdy, snow-white parchment — on the skin of goats from Morocco. This famous edition from the Cranach Press, described by many connoisseurs as “the most beautiful book printed in Germany in the twentieth century,” is presented here in a copy featuring four additional suites of Maillol's timeless woodcuts, exquisitely and masterfully bound by Georges Mercier in dark green morocco, and in mint condition. The six are lettered A–F and signed by Count Kessler's own hand. This is copy C.
Details
Large quarto (approx. 320 × 240 mm). 110 leaves, plus 3 unnumbered leaves. Printed throughout on very strong, snow-white goatskin parchment. With 43 woodcuts drawn and cut by Aristide Maillol; the initials designed by Maillol and cut by Eric Gill; the title-page, the headline lettering and all the initial letters — white on black — designed by Eric Gill.
Bound in dark green morocco (maroquin écrasé), the spine lettered in gilt, with olive-green morocco doublures, signed and dated “Georges Mercier, 1932.” Slipcase covered in green marbled paper, repeated on the flyleaves.
The Significance
The Klassik Stiftung Weimar: “ein herausragender Druck, der noch heute zu den schönsten des frühen 20. Jahrhunderts zählt” — an outstanding piece of printing, still among the most beautiful of the early twentieth century. Renate Müller-Krumbach, the press's bibliographer: “Eines der schönsten Bücher des 20. Jahrhunderts.”
The Cranach Press published Virgil's Eclogues in 1926 in three languages — French, English and German. It was the product of one man's vision. Harry Graf Kessler — diplomat, patron, and, in W. H. Auden's phrase, “a crown witness of our times” — was highly educated in the humanities, and there was no question in his mind that the first work to be published by the private press he founded should be Virgil's pastoral poems. He put the idea of a Virgil illustrated by Aristide Maillol to the sculptor in 1904; the Klassik Stiftung Weimar records the date flatly: “Bereits 1904 … hatte Harry Graf Kessler dem Bildhauer Aristide Maillol seine Idee vorgetragen.” The plan was settled on the journey to Greece that Kessler organised for Maillol in 1908; the British Museum dates the planning of the book itself to 1912.
Kessler's Rule for the Page
As early as 1905, Kessler wrote in his diary (Müller-Krumbach, p. 49):
“The book illustration should spring from the type, its black and white tonal effect, and not tear white holes or make black smears in the even colour of the text. It should therefore be principally linear, as the type is made up of lines. The thickness and thinness of the lines in the illustration should remain within the bounds of the thick and thin strokes of the letters, and the lines should, as much as possible, be distributed in the white of the picture plane as the letters are in the white of the page, so that there should not be larger white spaces in the picture area than in the text block.”
Maillol at the Block
Kessler had his vision; to realise it he needed an artist. He found one in a farmer's son from the Côte d'Azur, who had tried his hand at several arts and crafts and had just turned to sculpture. Kessler took Maillol to Greece, where the artist came to understand the essence of his own art: he recognised that the spirit of antiquity had remained alive in the bodies and gestures, movements and postures of ordinary people. Yet Kessler demanded a great deal, because the work was to be done in a craft with which Maillol had no experience whatever: the woodcut. Of course it had to be the woodcut — “the oldest and most primordial of all graphic printing techniques.” Maillol cut all forty-three blocks himself (British Museum).
Trial cuts for the edition were shown at the Leipzig Book Fair in 1914. Presswork began on the Weimar hand press in the spring of that year. Kessler passed the war as a cavalry captain and then orderly officer in Belgium, Russia, Poland, Hungary and France, and from 1916 in Bern, running German cultural propaganda for the Foreign Office and sounding out peace terms with France (Neue Deutsche Biographie, xi, 545). Maillol withdrew to Banyuls-sur-Mer for the duration (Musée d'Orsay). The type was being cut in England. Work resumed in June 1925 — Gill dated his proof of the publisher's device 5 March 1925 (V&A, E.1158-1952) — and the French edition was completed in April 1926 (Cambridge University Library).
Kessler felt compelled to keep an eye on his artist. From the diary, at work beside him:
“In the afternoon he carved the small fleeing kid for the second Eclogue. Primitiveness of his tools. No tracing paper for tracing, but just ordinary paper which he holds against the window pane. The tracing is done with the tip of his wife's scissors which were lying around. As he cut he constantly complained that he had no sharp knife and had to work with a broken-off chisel. He made the trial proofs by blacking the cuts with an old cork, laying the paper down and rubbing back and forth with a fork.” (pp. 46–47)
On the schedule: “It's terrible to assign a workload to a genius as if he were a schoolboy.” And: “Added to this was the fact that Maillol himself is a poet, even if his poetry is expressed not in words but in stone and clay, through proportions and lines.”
The Initials
“Maillol painted the ornaments with his small fine Japanese brush in white on the woodblock. Little by little I brought him the whole alphabet to decorate. Around four, after two hours, all twenty-six letters were finished. He invented for each letter a different ornament, therefore he needed for each letter only five minutes for invention and execution, a hardly believable rate of work. He enjoined me that (Eric) Gill should cut — he did not cut his alphabet himself because his eyes were not up to such close work — but certainly not try to imitate the irregularities of the brush strokes, but rather cut even and uniformly.”
Type, Paper, Parchment
The type. The roman was modelled on the Venetian type of Nicolas Jenson of 1470 and cut by Edward Prince under the supervision of Emery Walker (Klassik Stiftung Weimar; Toledo Museum of Art). Through countless trials Kessler refined the final typesetting. Prince had cut the punches for all three Kelmscott founts — Morris: “The punches for all these types, I may mention, were cut for me with great intelligence and skill by Mr. E. P. Prince” — and thereafter for Walker's Doves roman, Ricketts's Vale type, Pissarro's Brook type and the Ashendene Subiaco. He died in 1923; the accompanying italic, designed by Edward Johnston on the model of the Renaissance calligrapher Tagliente, is credited on the press's colophons to Prince and G. T. Friend. Kessler dedicated the Eclogues to Walker.
The press. The printing was executed by Erich Dreßler under Kessler and John Henry Mason, the typesetting by Walter Tanz (Klassik Stiftung Weimar).
The paper. Aristide's nephew Gaspard Maillol set out to find the finest materials, and for the ordinary copies Kessler had a paper made expressly for the book at the mill at Monval (also Montval) near Marly-le-Roi, established in 1911: a wove sheet of pure hemp, watermarked with Maillol's La Méditerranée — the sculpture of 1905 that made his name. Maillol on the paper:
“Somebody or other reproached me that I make naive woodcuts, whereas Vergil is not at all naive but, rather, elegant, refined. But I wasn't at all trying to do the same thing as Vergil. Who could imitate Vergil? Then one would have to invent a special illustration for every author? I was trying to make something lovely, something that would fit well with the typography. And I didn't try to copy Vergil. I did not illustrate Vergil, I illustrated the paper. And for that one first needs beautiful paper. Whether it's a book for kings, for students or for whores, the first thing one needs is beautiful paper.”
This edition has one distinguishing feature, lacking in many artists' books of later decades: the artist's willingness not to impose his own stamp on the work, but to subordinate himself almost entirely to the work as a whole, and to serve it with his unique talent.
The parchment. Six copies were printed instead on goatskin parchment. The colophon of the parchment issue records them as “six exemplaires sur parchemin fait spécialement pour cette édition avec des peaux de chèvres du Maroc, numérotés de A à F et signés de la main du Comte Kessler.”
This Copy: Four Suites
The colophon undertakes to supply each parchment copy with three additional suites of the woodcuts: “l'une sur Japon jaune en noir, la seconde sur Japon extra fort en noir, la troisième sur vélin en bistre.” This copy carries four, complete:
- in black, on old papier Japon;
- in black, on deep-yellow Japanese paper;
- in red, on China paper;
- in bistre, on vellum (= calfskin).
Set the two lists side by side and the supernumerary suite identifies itself. The colophon promises the two Japanese suites and the bistre, and says nothing of a suite in red. The red suite is the extra one.
The suites are prefaced by their own title leaf, printed on old Japan with a woodcut initial: “TIRAGE À PART DES BOIS POUR LES EXEMPLAIRES SUR PARCHEMIN — QUATRE SÉRIES DONT L'UNE SUR PARCHEMIN, TROIS SUR JAPON ANCIEN.”
The Binding: Georges Mercier, 1932
Georges Mercier was first in his class at the École Estienne in 1901 and began with Taffin-Lefort; he joined his father, the art binder Émile Mercier, in 1907 and succeeded him in 1910, working at 5 rue Séguier until his death in 1939, after which his widow dispersed the atelier's stock of some seventeen thousand gilding tools (Comité des travaux historiques et scientifiques, from Fléty and the Paris état civil). The present binding, signed and dated 1932: dark green morocco, gilt-lettered spine, full olive-green morocco doublures with a gilt fillet border. The slipcase is covered in a green marbled paper that answers the flyleaves.
In mint condition, in an elegant, masterfully crafted binding by Georges Mercier, with its matching slipcase.
After eighteen years Kessler could bear no more delay, and in the end the work had to be rushed — too much of a rush for Maillol, who did not see the final proofs. When he was shown the book, he said:
“I made the woodcuts for the Eclogues in such a way that, together with the text, they would fill the page and leave no empty spaces. And he (Kessler) made empty spaces everywhere. He printed the book without informing me, because he knew I would not agree.” (p. 48)
There are indeed empty spaces at three openings. To the observer a hundred years on, this flaw does nothing to detract from the overwhelming beauty of the edition. It serves rather to remind us of the almost superhuman achievement and perseverance of the men who gave us this enduring treasure.
Rarity
The census. The French edition was 292 copies in all: six on parchment, lettered A–F, signed by Kessler; thirty-six on a silk-ground paper made by hand, by special process, by Count Kessler and Aristide and Gaspard Maillol themselves at Monval near Marly-le-Roi, numbered in Roman figures; two hundred and fifty on the special hemp paper made at Monval, numbered in Arabic figures. The colophon marks thirty-six of the 292 hors commerce — one of the six on parchment, ten of the thirty-six, twenty-five of the two hundred and fifty. Only 256 copies were commercially issued, and only five of the six on parchment. The German edition of 1926 and the English edition of 1927 were printed to their own limitations, each with its own six on parchment; the six lettered copies are per edition, not six for the book.
First sold by Galerie Druet. The colophon closes: “L'ouvrage est mis en vente par la Galerie DRUET, 20 rue Royale, Paris.”
On the market. A search of the Rare Book Hub auction-catalogue index for the Cranach Press Eclogues returns “No Records Found.” No copy of the parchment issue is offered in the trade. Every copy of the Virgil presently for sale is an ordinary-paper copy.
The Brilliant Quartet
Count Harry Kessler (1868–1937) — visionary, patron, financier. Born in Paris to a German-Swiss banker father and an Irish mother, educated across France, England and Germany, Kessler was the embodiment of a cosmopolitan European aristocrat, and is widely considered one of the most ardent champions of aesthetic modernism in pre-war Germany. He promoted Aristide Maillol, the architect Henry van de Velde and the theatre designer Gordon Craig, and directed the Museum of Arts and Crafts in Weimar. After the First World War he moved from aristocrat to committed pacifist and internationalist, aligned himself with the Social Democrats, and earned the nickname “the Red Count”; the Nazi seizure of power drove him into exile in 1933 and he died in France in 1937. He was an obsessive diarist whose writings offer an unparalleled view into European society and politics, and he lived his life openly as a homosexual — a notable fact for a man in his position at the time. He conceived this project, financed every detail of its production, and oversaw the paper, the types and above all the artist. His drive is the sole reason the book exists at all.
Aristide Maillol (1861–1944) — the woodcuts. Born at Banyuls-sur-Mer, Maillol went to Paris in 1881 to study painting at the École des Beaux-Arts, where Puvis de Chavannes and Gauguin marked him. He briefly revived the art of tapestry in France before a deteriorating eye condition turned him to sculpture around 1900. His breakthrough was La Méditerranée of 1905, which set classical simplicity, harmony and stability against Rodin's emotionalism; almost all his mature work took the female form, stripped of literary association, and his conception of sculpture in the round reached later modernists including Henry Moore. In 1908 Kessler took him to Greece. With no prior experience of the woodcut he worked at the Eclogues intermittently for thirteen years, and cut all forty-three blocks himself — simple, clear and timeless, holding both the spirit of antiquity and the grace of ordinary Mediterranean life.
Sir Emery Walker (1851–1933) — typographer. An English engraver, photographer and printer, pivotal in the revival of fine printing. His schooling ended at thirteen, when his father lost his sight and the family needed supporting; he learned the history of printing across a decade at the Typographic Etching Company. He befriended William Morris in the late 1870s, sharing his socialism and his passion for printing, and the talk he gave in 1888 moved Morris to found the Kelmscott Press — the beginning of the private press movement in England. In 1900 he co-founded the Doves Press with T. J. Cobden-Sanderson and created the Doves roman on Jenson's model. Kessler engaged him to supervise the making of the Cranach Press type. He was knighted in 1930 for services to printing.
Eric Gill (1882–1940) — the title-page and the letters. Arthur Eric Rowton Gill trained as an architect in Brighton before letter-cutting under Edward Johnston took him over. He carved the Stations of the Cross for Westminster Cathedral (1914–18) and the relief Prospero and Ariel for Broadcasting House; he designed Perpetua (1925), Gill Sans (1927) and Joanna (1930), and cut and illustrated The Four Gospels for the Golden Cockerel Press (1931) in a type made expressly for it. He converted to Roman Catholicism in 1913 and founded craft communities built on manual labour and religious devotion. For the Cranach Press Eclogues he was responsible for the title-page design, the headline lettering and every initial letter, white on black; he cut the headline for the title page of the German edition in 1914 and for the English edition in 1927.
Provenance
The HT Collection.
Literature
Müller-Krumbach, Harry Graf Kessler und die Cranach-Presse in Weimar, 40 (with numerous reproductions) · Eyssen, Buchkunst in Deutschland, p. 94 · Rewald, The Woodcuts of Maillol, 8–53 · The Artist & the Book, 1860–1960 (Boston, MFA), 172 · Evan Gill 328 · Schauer, Deutsche Buchkunst 1890–1960, 89ff · The Art of the Printed Book, p. 38 and plate 110 · Ransom 163 · Sarkowski 1813 · Brinks 63 · From Manet to Hockney (V&A), 30 · The Engraved Work of Eric Gill (V&A), 104.
Full research dossier, collation notes and additional photography available on request. Atelier Zweig · Fine Books & Manuscripts · Marina del Rey, California · info@atelierzweig.com
