According to their website, the National Art Library, housed at the Victoria & Albert Museum, ‘holds the UK's most comprehensive public reference collection of literature on the fine and decorative arts, including books, journals, exhibition catalogues, auction house sales catalogues, comics, e-resources and much more’.
This bold claim is supported by its holding of in excess of 1 million items, which can be easily searched for online once one has taken the relatively simple step of becoming a member. Material can only be viewed at the library (and precious items will require assistance by a curator in order to turn the pages) but can be ordered in advance for a specified date, while items requested on the day are guaranteed to be made available within 90-minutes.
Through the good offices of Mark Frith and Cherrell Avery, 20 Letter Exchange members were welcomed to the library on 14 January by curators Victoria Worsfold and Frances Willis.
Of particular interest is their collection of illuminated manuscripts, which has grown from an original bequest of 83 items by William Reed in 1902 to include works by contemporary calligraphers (we saw pieces by Donald Jackson, Friedrich Poppl, KarlGeorg Hoefer, Werner Schneider and Imre Reiner) and other book artists, such as Paula Rego. It was wonderful to be able to see the original copy of Bembo’s sonnets, accurately described by Stan Knight: ‘The expert script avoids, on the one hand, the harsh pointedness of much cursive italic and, on the other, the mechanical rigidity of later hands that tended to imitate typography’ (Stan Knight, Historical Scripts, A&C Black, 1984, p. F6).
Printed books included a Kelmscott edition of William Morris’s News from Nowhere, an original printing dating from 1797 of Thomas Bewick’s History of British Birds, an artist’s book with acquatint etchings by Picasso to accompany text by the French naturalist, Buffon (Comte Georges Louis de Leclerc) – the edition fascinatingly dating from 1942 during the German occupation of Paris – and, of course, a copy of Rudolf Koch: Letterer, Type Designer, Calligrapher by our very own Jerry Cinamon.
There was also a striking copy of the Cranach Press Hamlet (1930) containing wood engravings by Edward Gordon Craig and title lettering by Eric Gill, beautifully printed on handmade paper with parallel commentary in French and English running round the central text of the play.
The black-letter typeface, of course, was designed by Edward Johnston for Count Kessler, based on a Cicero printed by Peter Schoeffer in 1466. We were able to review some of the correspondence between Johnston and the punch cutters, Edward Prince and then G.T. Friend following Prince’s death, during the creation of the type. There is an amusing account in Priscilla Johnston’s biography of her father of how Friend bore the brunt of Count Kessler’s frustration at the inevitable delays, demanding that he (Friend) extract the drawings from Johnston, only for Kessler to melt when ushered into the presence of the great man: ‘My dear Johnston, you look tired, you haven’t been taking care of yourself, you’ve been doing too much! (Priscilla Johnston, Edward Johnston, Barrie & Jenkins, 1959, p. 273).
We also saw a collection of early letters from (the evidently rather smitten) Johnston to the Macrae sisters, dating from the 1890s, commenced when he was still a student at Edinburgh University. It was through the Macrae family that he had been introduced to the pre-Raphaelites, the early romances of William Morris, the paintings of Rossetti and Burne-Jones. It is interesting also to compare the handwriting of this period in Johnston’s life with that of his more mature style.
The NAL is open Tuesday-Saturday from 10.00 to 5.30 (6.30 on Fridays). Membership details can be obtained from their website (https://www.vam.ac.uk/info/national-art-library).
[This review was published in Forum 37 (March 2019), the Journal of Letter Exchange, and is reproduced by permission of the Editor.]