A smart copy, in the original dust jacket, of the handsome limited edition of Edward Gordon Craig’s Nothing, Or the Bookplate, a selection and celebration of his ex libris designs (“they are my old friends”), many created for family and friends (as well as a number for himself), including designs for his mother, Ellen Terry, his sister, Edy Craig, her partner, the critic and author Christopher St. John, as well as the dancer, Isadora Duncan (with whom he had two children), the stage actor, ‘chromatologist,’ and pioneer in lighting design, Beatrice Irwin, and artist and (tarot) illustrator, Pamela Coleman Smith (see images below for a selection of Craig’s designs). Indeed, the collection offers a who’s who of the experimental and radical fringes of the fin de siècle British theatrical world: the “better Theatre [...Craig] wanted to fight for” as a younger man, partly supported, he tells us here, by the modest income (£2 a week) earned by designing bookplates. Between 1895 to 1912 Craig designed 122 bookplates, including an ex libris for the librarian Belle da Costa Greene (not collected here, sadly).
Edward Gordon Craig (1872–1966) was a British theatre director and designer, and illustrator, who “had as natural a gift for wood-engraving as he had for acting” (ODNB). His “earliest wood-engraving was a portrait of the poet Walt Whitman (1893), taken from a photograph. This was a revolutionary work, one of the earliest ‘white line’ wood-engravings of the modern era” (ibid). [ref: 3324]