Golden Cockerel Press
A feature of Golden Cockerel books was the original illustrations, usually wood engravings, contributed by artists including Eric Gill, Robert Gibbings, Peter Claude Vaudrey Barker-Mill, John Buckland Wright, Blair Hughes-Stanton, Agnes Miller Parker, David Jones, Mark Severin, Dorothea Braby, Lettice Sandford, Gwenda Morgan, Mary Elizabeth Groom and Eric Ravilious.
The Golden Cockerel Press was founded by Harold (Hal) Midgley Taylor (1893–1925) in 1920 and was first in Waltham St Lawrence in Berkshire where he had unsuccessfully tried fruit farming.
Taylor bought an army surplus hut and assembled it in Waltham St Lawrence as a combined workshop and living quarters.
The Press was set up as a cooperative with four partners, Hal Taylor, Barbara Blackburn, Pran Pyper, and Ethelwynne (Gay) Stewart McDowall.
The four initially lived at Taylor's mother's house in Beaconsfield and cycled daily to the hut in Waltham St Lawrence.
Their first publications were The Voices, a literary review, and Adam & Eve & Pinch Me, short stories by a new author, A. E. Coppard, which was a critical success and sold well.
[2] By summer 1921 Blackburn and Pyper had left and the co-operative became a more conventional private press when Frank Young, Albert Cooper and Harry Gibbs were employed.
[2] The printing staff – Frank Young, Albert Cooper and Harry Gibbs – were skilled and capable of very fine work.
Eric Gill was brought into the fold when he quarrelled with Hilary Pepler over the publication of Enid Clay's Sonnets and Verses (1925) and transferred the book to Gibbings.
Gibbings had established links with a number of booksellers, notably Bumpus in London, and negotiated a very favourable deal with Random House.
The first major book of the new regime was The Glory of Life (1934) by Llewelyn Powys, a large quarto with wood engravings by Gibbings.
They were looking to the long term, and tried a number of strategies to strengthen their position, including offering to buy the Gregynog Press so that they could close it down and reduce the competition.
In 1944 Rutter died but Sandford decided to carry on on his own; he had no financial need to seek a new partner, since the Chiswick Press, in which he had been a major shareholder, had been sold.
Yoseloff completed the publication of two titles in 1960 that had been previously commissioned by Sandford, a translation by David Gwyn Williams of the poem "In Defence of Woman" (O Blaid Y Gwragedd) by the 16th century Welsh poet William Cynwal, illustrated by John Petts, and Poems and Sonnets of Shakespeare, edited by Gwyn Jones and illustrated by Buckland Wright.
By the end of 1961 Yoseloff wound up operations, as the resources and fine bookcraft skills necessary for production of Golden Cockerel titles had become too difficult and costly to obtain.
