Sumner, Heywood.

[Beautiful Arts & Crafts Illustrations]. The Book of Gorley.

London: Printed at the Chiswick Press, 1910. First edition, with handwritten address label and ALS from Sumner to Horace Commin (a well-known Bournemouth bookseller who was a founding member of the Antiquarian Booksellers Association) pasted to the front free endpaper.

Sumner was an early member of the Arts and Crafts movement, who later rabidly pursued local amateur archaeology. The content of this work is rural living with a touch of archaeology, but with an Arts and Crafts aesthetic, and is filled throughout with Sumner’s illustrations. Even “Tolkien was [] very much influenced by the Arts and Crafts illustration style of Heywood Sumner.” Durotriges Project, Bournemouth University, @Durotrigesdig, March 1, 2023. “Mr. Sumner’s illustrations . . . are both numerous and effective. Their quaint formality is alive with character and atmosphere, and adds irresistibly to the charm of the book, insomuch that it will be strange if a reader can lay it down without experiencing an impulse to make secret pilgrimage to Cuckoo Hill [Gorley], and stand, but for a moment, a stranger (and a trespassing stranger) within its gates.” The Athenæum, July 23, 1910, pgs. 91-2.

4to. frontispiece, viii, 133pp., [1]. Scarce with OCLC not locating any copies in the US as of March 2024. Very good in original blind-stamped green cloth, top edge gilt, remainder untrimmed, gilt lettering to spine, light rubbing and bumping to extremities, prior owner bookplate and label of former ABA president and successor to Commin’s shop, Alan G. Thomas, to front pastedown. In a very good yellow clamshell box lined with black felt. Item #286

Price: $850.00