Laus Veneris

The striking line illustrations accompanying Swinburne’s Laus Veneris are by the Dunedin-born self-taught etcher and engraver, John Buckland-Wright (1897-1954)...

Lines composed a few miles above Tintern Abbey

The circumstances surrounding the creation of William Wordsworth’s Lines Composed a few miles above Tintern Abbey are given opposite the first lines of the poem, originally written on 13 July 1798 and first appearing in the now famous Lyrical Ballads (1798)...

Prayers written at Vailima

‘…As soon as our household had fallen into a regular routine, and the bonds of Samoan family life began to draw us more closely together, Tusitala [Samoan for storyteller, referring to Robert Louis Stevenson] felt the necessity of including our retainers in our evening devotions.’...

To Whom Else?

The Seizin Press, founded by Robert Graves and Laura (Riding) Jackson in 1927, was devoted to printing original literary materials, much like Virginia and Leonard Woolf’s Hogarth Press...

The Funeral Oration of Pericles

In mid-1945, Viscount Kemsley, the newspaper magnate, bought the equipment of the Corvinus Press, after its founder, Viscount Carlow, a linguist and RAF pilot, was killed in a plane crash...

Estrangement: Being Some Fifty Thoughts

Originally called Dum Emer Press, Cuala Press was initially part of a larger enterprise that was intended to stimulate Irish industry and give training and employment to Irish women...

A Printer’s Dozen: Eleven Spreads from Unrealised Books

‘Fine press printers are forever faced with the dilemma of content. They are criticized either for squandering their efforts on minor poetry by their friends, or for endlessly turning out more versions of the small repertoire of classics whose length makes them suitable for setting and printing by hand.’ ...

The Faerie Queene

The colophon, or finishing stroke, is a note at the end of a book giving all or some of the following particulars: name of work, author, printer, place of printing and date. In its elementary function of identifying the edition, it has been superceded by the title-page...

The World at Auction

Charles Ricketts (1866-1931) was founder of the Vale Press and designer of numerous books, including Oscar Wilde’s Dorian Gray (1891) and John Gray’s Silverpoints (1893)...

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Poems and Drawings

When Roy Lewis, owner of the Keepsake Press, visited one of the Russian satellite countries, he mentioned casually that he owned a private press. There was instant attention and he was asked: ‘What subversive revolutionary things did he produce?’...

© 2004 University of Otago Library

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