As a typographer, publisher, and wood engraver Charles Ricketts (1866-1931) was a versatile and innovative practitioner who exerted a powerful influence on the development of modern book design. The Vale Press is the most extensive account to date of his quest to become "a publisher in earnest".
Beginning with Ricketts's work as "a designer of books and bindings" for Oscar Wilde, the story of the Vale Press reveals for the first time the nature of Ricketts's collaboration with the master printer Charles McCall of the Ballantyne Press and the degree to which Ricketts's success, both artistic and commercial, depended upon the transformation of his redundant skill as a wood engraver into a positive medium of artistic expression.
This work offers a historic window into the world of Ricketts, his contemporaries, and the British fine press movement. Readers will also find this history well-illustrated in colour and black and white with a comprehensive bibliography of the works of the Vale Press and Ricketts.