{"product_id":"the-cranach-press-virgil-on-vellum-one-of-six-deluxe-copies-with-four-extra-suites-bound-by-georges-mercier","title":"Cranach-Presse Virgil, Les Églogues, 1926 — one of six copies of the French edition on vellum, copy C, four suites, bound by Georges Mercier","description":"\u003cdiv style=\"font-family:Georgia,'Times New Roman',serif;font-size:15px;line-height:1.62;color:#111;max-width:820px;\"\u003e\n\n\u003cdiv style=\"letter-spacing:.14em;font-size:11px;color:#8a7d66;text-transform:uppercase;\"\u003eVirgil — Maillol — Kessler — Gill · Printed on Vellum\u003c\/div\u003e\n\u003ch2 style=\"font-weight:normal;font-size:23px;margin:6px 0 2px;\"\u003eLes Églogues de Virgile\u003c\/h2\u003e\n\u003cdiv style=\"font-style:italic;color:#444;font-size:15px;margin-bottom:4px;\"\u003eTexte original et traduction nouvelle par Marc Lafargue. Bois dessinés et exécutés par Aristide Maillol. Imprimé par Harry de Kessler.\u003c\/div\u003e\n\u003cdiv style=\"color:#555;font-size:14px;\"\u003e[Weimar]: Cranach-Presse, 1926.\u003c\/div\u003e\n\n\u003cp style=\"margin-top:18px;\"\u003e\u003cb\u003eA deluxe copy of the legendary 1926 \u003ci\u003eVirgil\u003c\/i\u003e of the Cranach Press — \u003cb style=\"letter-spacing:.02em;\"\u003eprinted on vellum\u003c\/b\u003e, on the skin of goats from Morocco: one of only six copies of the French edition so printed, lettered A–F, and this is copy C. Enriched with four complete additional suites of all the woodcuts by Aristide Maillol, and bound in 1932 by Georges Mercier of Paris. In mint condition.\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003ch3 style=\"font-size:11px;letter-spacing:.13em;color:#555;text-transform:uppercase;font-weight:normal;border-bottom:1px solid #ddd;padding-bottom:4px;margin-top:26px;\"\u003eDetails\u003c\/h3\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eLarge 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 designed by Eric Gill.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eThe edition in French was limited to 292 copies: six on parchment, lettered A–F; thirty-six on imperial Japanese paper, numbered in Roman figures; and two hundred and fifty on the hemp-and-linen paper made for the book at Montval, numbered in Arabic figures. The colophon of the parchment issue records that copies A–F were \u003ci\u003e“printed on the skin of goats from Morocco.”\u003c\/i\u003e \u003cb\u003eThe present copy is lettered C.\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eBound in dark green crushed morocco (\u003ci\u003emaroquin écrasé\u003c\/i\u003e), the spine lettered in gilt, with olive-green morocco doublures, signed and dated \u003cb\u003e“Georges Mercier, 1932.”\u003c\/b\u003e Slipcase covered in green marbled paper, repeated on the flyleaves.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003ch3 style=\"font-size:11px;letter-spacing:.13em;color:#555;text-transform:uppercase;font-weight:normal;border-bottom:1px solid #ddd;padding-bottom:4px;margin-top:26px;\"\u003eEighteen Years\u003c\/h3\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eHarry Graf Kessler — diplomat, patron, and, in W. H. Auden's phrase, “a crown witness of our times” — put the idea of a Virgil illustrated by Aristide Maillol to the sculptor as early as 1904. The Klassik Stiftung Weimar records the date flatly: \u003ci\u003e“Harry Graf Kessler stellte die Idee bereits 1904 vor.”\u003c\/i\u003e Printing began in the spring of 1914. The war stopped it. It did not resume until June 1925, and the last sheet was pulled in April 1926 — a book carried across a world war, a collapsed empire and a hyperinflation by one man's refusal to abandon it.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eThe Cranach-Presse Virgil is not merely a fine book of its period; it is the book against which the period is measured. The Klassik Stiftung Weimar calls it \u003ci\u003e“ein herausragender Druck, der noch heute zu den schönsten des frühen 20. Jahrhunderts zählt”\u003c\/i\u003e — an outstanding piece of printing that still counts today among the most beautiful of the early twentieth century. Renate Müller-Krumbach, the press's bibliographer, puts it more simply: \u003ci\u003e“Eines der schönsten Bücher des 20. Jahrhunderts.”\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003ch3 style=\"font-size:11px;letter-spacing:.13em;color:#555;text-transform:uppercase;font-weight:normal;border-bottom:1px solid #ddd;padding-bottom:4px;margin-top:26px;\"\u003eKessler's Rule for the Page\u003c\/h3\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eKessler set down in his diary the principle that governs every opening of this book — the reason its woodcuts sit in the text rather than on it:\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cblockquote style=\"margin:10px 0 10px 18px;padding-left:14px;border-left:2px solid #ddd;color:#333;font-style:italic;\"\u003e“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.”\u003c\/blockquote\u003e\n\n\u003ch3 style=\"font-size:11px;letter-spacing:.13em;color:#555;text-transform:uppercase;font-weight:normal;border-bottom:1px solid #ddd;padding-bottom:4px;margin-top:26px;\"\u003eMaillol at the Block\u003c\/h3\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eMaillol was a sculptor, not a wood-engraver; Kessler demanded the woodcut precisely because it was, in his words, the oldest and most primordial of the graphic printing techniques. Kessler watched him work and wrote it down:\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cblockquote style=\"margin:10px 0 10px 18px;padding-left:14px;border-left:2px solid #ddd;color:#333;font-style:italic;\"\u003e“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 … 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.”\u003c\/blockquote\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eAnd, on the impossibility of scheduling him: \u003ci\u003e“It's terrible to assign a workload to a genius as if he were a schoolboy.”\u003c\/i\u003e Kessler's verdict on why it was worth it: \u003ci\u003e“Maillol himself is a poet, even if his poetry is expressed not in words but in stone and clay, through proportions and lines.”\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eThe initials tell the same story. Maillol painted the ornaments with a brush, a different ornament for each letter, at a rate Kessler found scarcely credible — five minutes for the invention and execution of each. He then gave a precise instruction for the cutting, to be carried out by Eric Gill: not to imitate the irregularities of the brush strokes, but to cut evenly and uniformly.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003ch3 style=\"font-size:11px;letter-spacing:.13em;color:#555;text-transform:uppercase;font-weight:normal;border-bottom:1px solid #ddd;padding-bottom:4px;margin-top:26px;\"\u003eThe Type, the Paper, the Hands\u003c\/h3\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eThe type.\u003c\/b\u003e The roman was modelled on the Venetian type of Nicolas Jenson of 1470, under the supervision of Emery Walker — the engraver and printer whose 1888 lecture had set William Morris on the road to the Kelmscott Press, and who went on to co-found the Doves Press. The punches were cut by Edward Prince, the last of the great English punchcutters; the accompanying italic was designed by Edward Johnston, the reviver of the broad-nib hand and Gill's own master.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eThe paper.\u003c\/b\u003e For the ordinary copies Kessler had a paper made expressly for the book at Montval, at the mill established in 1912 by the sculptor's nephew Gaspard Maillol: a wove sheet of pure hemp and linen fibre, watermarked with Maillol's \u003ci\u003eLa Méditerranée\u003c\/i\u003e. Maillol's own account of why this mattered has lost none of its bite: \u003ci\u003e“Somebody or other reproached me that I make naive woodcuts, whereas Virgil is not at all naive but, rather, elegant … whether one makes books for kings, for students or for whores, the first thing one needs is beautiful paper.”\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eThe parchment.\u003c\/b\u003e Six copies were not printed on the Montval paper at all. They were printed on goatskin — parchment so white and so strong that the impression of Maillol's blocks on it is unlike any paper pull. This is one of those six.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003ch3 style=\"font-size:11px;letter-spacing:.13em;color:#555;text-transform:uppercase;font-weight:normal;border-bottom:1px solid #ddd;padding-bottom:4px;margin-top:26px;\"\u003eThis Copy: Four Suites, Not Three\u003c\/h3\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eThe colophon undertakes to supply each parchment copy with three additional suites of the woodcuts. \u003cb\u003eThis copy carries four\u003c\/b\u003e, complete:\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003col style=\"margin:8px 0 8px 20px;\"\u003e\n\u003cli\u003ein black, on old \u003ci\u003epapier Japon\u003c\/i\u003e;\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003ein black, on deep-yellow Japanese paper;\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003ein red, on China paper;\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003ein bistre, on vellum (calfskin).\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003c\/ol\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eFour suites on four different substrates, bound with a parchment copy of the book itself, is the fullest state in which the Cranach-Presse Virgil is known to exist.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003ch3 style=\"font-size:11px;letter-spacing:.13em;color:#555;text-transform:uppercase;font-weight:normal;border-bottom:1px solid #ddd;padding-bottom:4px;margin-top:26px;\"\u003eThe Binding: Georges Mercier, 1932\u003c\/h3\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eGeorges Mercier (Paris, 1885–1939) directed one of the most exacting Parisian binding ateliers of the interwar years; his death in 1939 closed it. The present binding, signed and dated 1932, is squarely of his best period: dark green crushed morocco, gilt-lettered spine, and full olive-green morocco doublures — a treatment reserved for books their owners regarded as permanent. The slipcase is covered in a green marbled paper that answers the flyleaves.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003ch3 style=\"font-size:11px;letter-spacing:.13em;color:#555;text-transform:uppercase;font-weight:normal;border-bottom:1px solid #ddd;padding-bottom:4px;margin-top:26px;\"\u003eRarity\u003c\/h3\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eThe census.\u003c\/b\u003e The French edition was 292 copies in all: \u003cb\u003esix on parchment, lettered A–F\u003c\/b\u003e; thirty-six on imperial Japanese paper, numbered in Roman figures; two hundred and fifty on the Montval hemp-and-linen paper, numbered in Arabic figures. Six copies of 292 is two per cent of the edition, and one of the six was a printer's copy. The English and German editions 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.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eOn the market.\u003c\/b\u003e A search of the Rare Book Hub auction-catalogue index for the Cranach Press \u003ci\u003eEclogues\u003c\/i\u003e returns \u003ci\u003e“No Records Found.”\u003c\/i\u003e No copy of the parchment issue is offered in the trade. Every copy of the Virgil presently for sale is an ordinary-paper copy.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003ch3 style=\"font-size:11px;letter-spacing:.13em;color:#555;text-transform:uppercase;font-weight:normal;border-bottom:1px solid #ddd;padding-bottom:4px;margin-top:26px;\"\u003eCondition\u003c\/h3\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eIn mint condition, in an elegant, masterfully crafted binding by Georges Mercier, with its matching slipcase.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eA note in the interest of full description: at three openings the page carries blank space where a woodcut was expected. Maillol never forgave it — \u003ci\u003e“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 made empty spaces everywhere. He printed the book without informing me, because he knew I would not agree.”\u003c\/i\u003e The blanks are a feature of the edition as issued, not a defect of this copy; a century on they read as the fingerprint of an eighteen-year argument between two men who were both right.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003ch3 style=\"font-size:11px;letter-spacing:.13em;color:#555;text-transform:uppercase;font-weight:normal;border-bottom:1px solid #ddd;padding-bottom:4px;margin-top:26px;\"\u003eProvenance\u003c\/h3\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eThe Heribert Tenschert Collection. Offered by Atelier Zweig as United States representative of Heribert Tenschert, Antiquariat Bibermühle.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003ch3 style=\"font-size:11px;letter-spacing:.13em;color:#555;text-transform:uppercase;font-weight:normal;border-bottom:1px solid #ddd;padding-bottom:4px;margin-top:26px;\"\u003eLiterature\u003c\/h3\u003e\n\n\u003cp style=\"font-size:14px;color:#333;\"\u003eMüller-Krumbach, \u003ci\u003eHarry Graf Kessler und die Cranach-Presse in Weimar\u003c\/i\u003e, 40 · Schauer II, 73 · Sarkowski 1813 · Rewald 8–52 · Brinks 63 · \u003ci\u003eThe Artist \u0026amp; the Book, 1860–1960\u003c\/i\u003e (Boston, MFA), 172 · \u003ci\u003eFrom Manet to Hockney\u003c\/i\u003e (V\u0026amp;A), 30 · Gill 328 · \u003ci\u003eThe Engraved Work of Eric Gill\u003c\/i\u003e (V\u0026amp;A), 104 · Castleman, \u003ci\u003eA Century of Artists Books\u003c\/i\u003e, p. 110.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp style=\"margin-top:22px;font-size:13.5px;color:#555;\"\u003eFull research dossier, collation notes and additional photography available on request. Atelier Zweig · Fine Books \u0026amp; Manuscripts · Marina del Rey, California · info@atelierzweig.com\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003c\/div\u003e\n","brand":"Atelier Zweig Rare Books","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":47204487594172,"sku":"L-VERGIL-C","price":120000.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0736\/1285\/3436\/files\/Vergil-maillol-cranach-press-1926-vellum_281_29.jpg?v=1785273711","url":"https:\/\/atelierzweig.com\/products\/the-cranach-press-virgil-on-vellum-one-of-six-deluxe-copies-with-four-extra-suites-bound-by-georges-mercier","provider":"Atelier Zweig Rare Books","version":"1.0","type":"link"}