Whittington Press ~ England
(John and Rose Randle)

Collaborations with Mark Batty, Type & Typography
Broadside by Whittington Press
Resource Books by Whittington Press

A View of the Cotswolds
Photographs by Edwin Smith
with essays, commentaries, & a checklist
by Shawn Kholucy, Ian Mackenzie-Kerr, Alan Powers, George Ramsden, Edwin Smith, Veronica Watts and Rory Young
Herefordshire: Whittington Press, 2005.
Edition of 350 (280, standard; 70, deluxe)

9.75 x 13.75"; 56 pages. Set in Poliphilus & Fry's Baskerville. Printed on Bugra-Butten mould-made paper. Tritones printed by CTD Printers. The wood-engraving on the cover is by Edwin Smith.

Whittington Press: "Photographs were taken by Edwin Smith fifty years ago while on a visit with his wife, Olive Cook, to the Cotswolds. Smith, who died in 1971, was one of the United Kingdom's foremost landscape and architectural photographers. Olive Cook was working on the text to accompany the photographs when she died in 2002. She had made the final choices of the photographs and had arranged them in the order in which she had wanted them. Her work was taken up by Shawn Kholucy and Rory Young, who visited each site and noted the changes to the buildings and landscapes. The book concludes with a bibliography of the books written by Edwin Smith and Olive Cook."

Norman Scarfe, review in Parenthesis 12: "What is most astonishing and consoling to the readers in 2005 of A View of the Cotswolds is that her young faithful friends, the admirable contributors to this lovely book of Edwin's Views dare to 'hope that in another fifty years all these fifty Cotswold sites will still be as easily identifiable as they are today.' The photographs, like the Views themselves, are of course superb, and beautifully printed and presented.

"Not that the Views remain quite the same as in the 1950s: 'Not only are there more horseshoes on those cottages now than when working horses were commonplace, but they sit beside burglar-alarm boxes; the way of living, working and thinking is divorced from that of two generations ago.' The observers go further, noting that 'the practiced eye of the craftsman, developed by tutelage and deep familiarity with a limited palette, has closed.'"

A visual record from the 1950s of this celebrated section of rural England.

Deluxe: Bound in half-leather binding with printed paper boards. Includes separate portfolio in quarter cloth and paper boards which contains two prints made from the original negatives. Slipcased.
$510 (One copy)

Whittington Press Out of Print Titles:
• Britten's Aldeburgh
• Busy as a Bee
• Gwenda Morgan: The Diary of a Land Girl
• Fine Papers at the Oxford University Press
• Matrix 6
• Matrix 9
• Matrix 14
• Matrix 18
• Matrix 21: A Review for Printers & Bibliophiles
• Matrix 22
• Matrix 24 deluxe
• Matrix 24 standard
• Matrix 25
• Mattioli’s Herbal
• The wood engravings of John O’Connor