The six woodcut illustrations were cut by William Hooper after designs by Charles M Gere with the binding of russet morocco-backed oak boards by WH Smith and Son.
The three-volume quarto edition ‘Dante – Lo Inferno; Lo Purgatorio; Lo Paradiso’ was an earlier Ashendene project for 1902-05. The woodcuts for this edition were adapted by Catterson Smith and Charles Keates from an early Venetian edition of Dante.
These copies were sold in 2012 by Sophie Schneideman Rare Books as part of the collection of Clarence B Hanson Jr (1908-83), the publisher of The Birmingham News in Alabama for over 35 years. They were priced at £45,000 and £11,000 respectively.
The 1924 Ashendene edition of ‘The Golden Asse of Lucius Apuleius’ was printed in Emery Walker’s Subiaco type in an edition of 124, of which just 16 copies were printed on vellum. Its decoration includes coloured and gilt initials by Graily Hewitt. This copy on vellum was bound in full brickred morocco gilt at the WH Smith bindery, perhaps by Douglas Cockerell. It took an unexpected £17,000 at Bamfords in Derby in November 2017 – more than doubling the previous auction best, set at Sotheby’s New York back in 1989.
