Fourteen Wood Engravings

1932

Special Collections G540 GD98. Reproduced by permission of the Robert Gibbings Estate and the Heather Chalcroft Literary Agency

Waltham St Lawrence, Berkshire: Printed by Robert Gibbings at The Golden Cockerel Press

Gibbings described this volume as one full of ‘engravings of people and places as far apart as Trinidad from Tunis, as La Guaira [Venezuela] from Skansen [Sweden]’. Fourteen Wood Engravings was from his time spent ‘on cruising steamers of the Orient Line.’ He procured several commissions for work from the Orient Line company and on one occasion, feeling the need to get away from his family and Waltham St Lawrence, he wrote to the company offering to produce a few wood blocks in return for a free trip to the West Indies. The fourteen engravings include images with titles such as ‘Mediterranean Calm’, ‘Noontime in Italy’, and ‘Mid Coral Caves, Bermuda’. His style of clean lines has been described as ‘striking and vigorous’ and is at times both powerful and sensuous.