Ashendene Press

Ashendene books were carefully printed with large margins, and despite their lack of extravagant decoration, they were considered spectacular works of art.

[1] Eric Gill, Graily Hewitt, Charles Gere, and Gwen Raverat were other artists who worked for the press.

He used paper from J. Batchelor & Sons and vellum from H. Band & Co.[1] Ashendene books were bound by Zaehnsdorf initially and later were done by the W. H. Smith bindery.

[13][11] Initially, Hornby used fonts of the Fell type,[3] but most Ashendene editions used one of two fonts which were specially cast for the Press: Subiaco, which was based on a fifteenth-century Italian type cast by Arnold Pannartz and Konrad Sweynheim in Subiaco, Italy, and to a lesser extent Ptolemy.

[14] Morris originally planned to design a type based on Pannartz and Sweynheim's work, but abandoned the project.

Hornby, who didn't consider himself a designer, paid for the project to be completed, named the font Subiaco, and used it in the Ashendene Press for more than 20 years.

The original Pannartz and Sweynheim type had rather gothic characteristics but the Ashendene version eliminated the long "s" and completely redesigned the "k," "w" and "y.

Some Ashendene books, such as that by St. Francis of Assisi, were illustrated with wood-engravings, but the majority were printed solely using type.

[11] The Ashendene Inferno received high praise in the New York Times from Theodore de Vinne, who said that Subiaco was "the most satisfactory reproduction of a fifteenth-century face that has yet appeared.

"[1] Four years later, the Ashendene Press published the complete works of Dante under the title Tutte le Opere di Dante Alighieri, also in Subiaco, which is considered to be one of the greatest works by an English private press along with the Kelmscott's Chaucer and the Doves' Bible for its precision, clearness, readability, and artistry.

[11] The press experienced ruin when their first attempt at printing Daphnis et Chloé on Japanese vellum was folded before the ink had dried completely.

This edition featured blue initials by Hewitt, wood engravings by Raverat, and Monotype Pastonic italic, a typeface not used by the Ashendene Press elsewhere.