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Summary
Author: Ashbee, C.R.
Title: Peckover. The Abbotscourt papers 1904-1931. Edited by C.R.Ashbee. Illustrated by Reginald Savage.
Publication: London, "printed at the Curwen Press and published by The Astolat Press, Publishers at 101 Great Russell Street" 1932.
Price: £180
Reference: 09204
Full Description
Folio. xi + (1) + 268pp, woodcut ills (partly coloured). Publisher's quarter vellum, decorative paper boards. One of 350 numbered copies. From the library of the Art Workers Guild, with their pictorial bookplate and presentation inscription from Mrs Hamilton Smith. In good condition.
Here the architect and Arts and Crafts enthusiast C.R. Ashbee (1863-1942) creates a fictional village called Peckover (not all that dissimilar in character and population to Chipping Campden, the location between 1902 and 1917 of his Guild of Handicraft). Its history since the Norman Conquest is presented in dramatic narrative snapshots, punctuated by a twentieth century sub-plot played out in journal entries and correspondence involving his two twentieth century heroes, "Harry Vane" and "Arthur Trysting", who seem both to be extensions of different facets of Ashbee's own complex personality.