A pleasing set of the Adelphi Edition of the works of Jane Austen, complete in seven volumes (1927-30), from the library of the friend and “lifelong disciple” of Eric Gill, Walter Shewring, with his magnificent near contemporary ‘monk and wolf’ bookplate designed by David Jones.
Walter Hayward Francis Shewring (1906-1990), a distinguished classicist and translator, educator and musicologist (amongst other things), was classics master at Ampleforth College, York from 1927. Shewring had been “swept off his feet by Eric Gill, whose lifelong disciple he became,” and, like David Jones, “he was one of the essential people [... at Piggotts...] another son-substitute, as well as the resident intellectual” (Ricks, 2022; MacCarthy, 1990). An important “interpreter” of Gill, Shewring’s ‘Considerations on Eric Gill’ “remains the most illuminating commentary on Gill’s philosophy of art and workmanship” (MacCarthy,1990). He also edited Gill’s Letters (1947).
David Jones (1895–1974) illustrated two of Shewring’s interwar poetry collections printed at St. Dominic's Press, Ditchling, The Water Meads (1927) and Hermia (1930), as well as engraving Shewring’s remarkable bookplate in 1925.
Fiona MacCarthy (1990) Eric Gill (London: Faber and Faber); David Ricks (2022) ‘Christendom and Anti-Hellenism: Walter Shewring's Sallies,’ Arion: A Journal of the Humanities and the Classics, 30:1