Ashendene Press: Typography and the Art of the Private-Press Book

The Ashendene Press was one of the most distinguished English private presses of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Established by Charles Harold St John Hornby in 1894, with its first books dated 1895, the press transformed printing into a carefully orchestrated decorative art. Its publications combined historically informed typefaces, handmade paper, calligraphic initials, wood engraving and finely judged page proportions. Alongside the Kelmscott Press and Doves Press, Ashendene became a leading expression of the British Private Press Movement.

Key Features of the Ashendene Press

• Operated by C. H. St John Hornby from 1894–95 until 1935.
• Initially based at the Hornby family home in Hertfordshire and later at Shelley House, Chelsea.
• Associated with the Private Press Movement and the ideals of the Arts and Crafts Movement.
• Created the historically inspired Subiaco and Ptolemy typefaces.
• Produced approximately forty titles, generally in small editions.
• Collaborated with Emery Walker, Sydney Cockerell, Graily Hewitt, Eric Gill, Charles M. Gere and Gwen Raverat.
• Used handmade paper, vellum, hand-set metal type and carefully executed bindings.

C. H. St John Hornby and the Founding of Ashendene Press

Charles Harold St John Hornby (1867–1946) was a partner in the bookselling and publishing firm W. H. Smith & Son. Nevertheless, printing remained a personal rather than primarily commercial activity. He established a hand press at his family home, Ashendene, near Bayford in Hertfordshire. The house supplied the press with its name, while members of Hornby’s family assisted with some of its earliest productions.

Dates for the foundation of the Ashendene Press vary slightly between reference works. Hornby began experimenting with printing in 1894, while the earliest books associated with the press appeared in 1895. For this reason, institutional histories frequently give 1895 as its founding date. After Hornby moved to Shelley House in Chelsea around 1899, the press became established there, with Chelsea imprints appearing from the beginning of the new century.

Production continued until 1915, when the First World War interrupted the press’s activities. Hornby resumed printing in 1920 and continued until 1935. According to the University of Melbourne’s account of the Ashendene Dante, the press issued approximately forty titles. Many were distributed as gifts or sold to a small body of subscribers rather than produced for a mass market.

Ashendene Press and the Private Press Movement

The Ashendene Press developed in the wake of William Morris’s Kelmscott Press, founded in 1891. Morris treated the book as a unified work of art in which type, illustration, ornament, paper and binding should support one another. Hornby shared this concern for material and visual unity, although his books generally adopted a quieter and more spacious appearance than Kelmscott publications.

The wider Arts and Crafts Movement challenged the declining standards that reformers associated with poorly managed industrial production. Private presses responded by recovering historical printing practices, commissioning original type and emphasising the skills of printers, calligraphers, engravers, papermakers and bookbinders.

Hornby knew figures closely connected with the Kelmscott enterprise, particularly Emery Walker and Sydney Cockerell. Walker was an important adviser on printing, typography and photographic reproduction, while Cockerell had served as William Morris’s secretary. Through these relationships, Ashendene became part of a network that carried the ideals of William Morris into twentieth-century book design.

Subiaco Type and the Revival of Early Italian Printing

The most recognisable element of Ashendene Press typography is the Subiaco typeface. Emery Walker and Sydney Cockerell developed the face for Hornby, while the distinguished punchcutter Edward Prince cut its punches. Its model was the semi-Roman type used by Konrad Sweynheym and Arnold Pannartz at Subiaco, near Rome, during the 1460s.

Sweynheym and Pannartz established the first printing press in Italy. Their letterforms appeared at a transitional moment when printers were adapting manuscript scripts to movable metal type. Consequently, their characters combine qualities associated with Gothic writing and the emerging Roman letter. The Ashendene interpretation preserved this historical character without becoming a literal facsimile.

Subiaco type has a dark, energetic texture, but its individual letters remain clear. Its irregularities give a printed page some of the vitality of manuscript writing. This balance between historical reference and practical legibility made it particularly appropriate for Hornby’s editions of medieval and Renaissance literature.

The type first appeared in Ashendene’s Lo Inferno di Dante Alighieri Fiorentino of 1902. It was subsequently used throughout the companion volumes Purgatorio of 1904 and Paradiso of 1905. The Wilson Art Gallery and Museum’s Ashendene Press collection documents these books and identifies the 1902 Inferno as the first Ashendene publication printed in Subiaco.

Ptolemy Type and the Ashendene Don Quixote

A second proprietary type, known as Ptolemy, was prepared for Ashendene’s edition of Don Quixote. Its historical model came from the type used in the 1482 Ulm edition of Ptolemy’s Geographia, also known as the Cosmographia, printed by Lienhart Holle.

Ptolemy has a lighter, more explicitly Roman character than Subiaco. It nevertheless retains the robust forms and controlled irregularities associated with fifteenth-century printing. The face was introduced in The First and Second Part of the History of the Valorous and Wittie Knight-Errant Don Quixote of the Mancha, issued in two volumes in 1927 and 1928.

The edition employed Thomas Shelton’s early English translation. Woodcut initials and borders designed by Louise Powell complemented the typography without overwhelming it. According to the Texas A&M University Cervantes collection, 225 copies were printed on Batchelor handmade paper, with another twenty copies produced on vellum.

Subiaco and Ptolemy demonstrate that historical revival could become a form of original design. Hornby and his collaborators did not merely reproduce antique letters. Instead, they studied early printing and translated its visual character into type suitable for a modern hand press. The surviving punches for both faces are now held in the Historical Printing Room at Cambridge University Library.

Calligraphy, Initial Letters and Illustration

Ashendene books frequently combined printed type with hand-drawn or hand-painted initials. Calligraphers Graily Hewitt and Edward Johnston contributed initials, while Eric Gill also undertook lettering for the press. Their work softened the distinction between printed book and illuminated manuscript.

Graily Hewitt became particularly important to the visual identity of the press. His initials, executed in colours including red, blue and gold, supplied carefully controlled points of emphasis within otherwise restrained pages. In A Book of Songs and Poems from the Old Testament and the Apocrypha of 1904, Subiaco type printed in black and red was complemented by Hewitt’s initials on vellum.

Illustration was used selectively. This restraint distinguished Ashendene from the densely ornamented books of the Kelmscott Press. When illustrations appeared, Hornby integrated them closely with the page architecture rather than treating them as independent pictures.

The monumental Tutte le Opere di Dante Alighieri Fiorentino, completed in 1909, included six woodblocks cut by William Harcourt Hooper and Charles M. Gere. The designs drew upon a Venetian edition of Dante published in 1497. Printed over approximately three years in an edition of only 111 copies, the Ashendene Dante became one of the defining books of the English Private Press Movement.

Late in the press’s history, Gwen Raverat produced wood engravings for Les Amours Pastorales de Daphnis et Chloé of 1933. Raverat’s lucid, rhythmic imagery complemented the classical subject and the disciplined typography. Her contribution demonstrates Ashendene’s continuing engagement with contemporary wood engraving as well as historical models.

Materials, Printing and Bookbinding

Ashendene Press books were produced through a combination of specialised materials and patient manual labour. Text was set by hand and printed on hand-operated presses. Hornby commonly used handmade paper produced by the Batchelor paper mill, sometimes carrying watermarks created specifically for Ashendene. A small number of copies from important editions were printed on vellum.

Black supplied the principal text colour, while red and blue distinguished headings, initials and marginal elements. Rather than filling the page with decoration, Hornby relied on the relationship between type area, margins, line spacing and paper size. These proportions gave Ashendene books a monumental quality even when ornament remained minimal.

Bindings were equally important. Bookbinder Katharine Adams worked on several Ashendene publications, while other volumes were bound through the W. H. Smith bindery managed by Douglas Cockerell. Materials ranged from vellum and cloth-backed boards to elaborately tooled leather. The binding completed the book as a designed object rather than serving merely as a protective covering.

Major Books Printed by the Ashendene Press

• Lo Inferno di Dante Alighieri Fiorentino, 1902
• A Book of Songs and Poems from the Old Testament and the Apocrypha, 1904
• Tutte le Opere di Dante Alighieri Fiorentino, 1909
• Le Morte Darthur, 1913
• The Faerie Queene, 1923
• Spenser’s Minor Poems, 1925
• Don Quixote, 1927–1928
• The History of the Peloponnesian War, 1930
• Les Amours Pastorales de Daphnis et Chloé, 1933
• A Descriptive Bibliography of the Books Printed at the Ashendene Press, 1935

The Design Legacy of Ashendene Press

Hornby closed the Ashendene Press in 1935 with the publication of his descriptive bibliography. By documenting the press’s books, materials, editions and collaborators, this final volume became both a record of achievement and a deliberate conclusion to the enterprise.

The significance of Ashendene Press extends beyond bibliophilia. Its books demonstrate principles that remain central to graphic design: the considered selection of type, the relationship between positive and negative space, the coordination of text and image, and the importance of material to visual communication. These qualities connect Ashendene with the longer history of printing represented by figures such as Johannes Gutenberg, William Caxton and Aldus Manutius.

Ashendene also illustrates the productive tension between tradition and innovation. Hornby looked to fifteenth-century books for inspiration, yet the resulting publications were unmistakably products of modern design consciousness. Their layouts did not imitate the past indiscriminately. Instead, they selected, refined and reorganised historical forms to create books of exceptional coherence.

Today, Ashendene publications are preserved in major libraries and museum collections as outstanding examples of typography, craftsmanship and material culture. Their enduring reputation rests on the conviction that a book communicates through more than its words. Type, paper, ink, illustration, proportion and binding all participate in the act of reading.

Authoritative Collections and Further Reading

• University of Missouri Libraries: Ashendene Press
• University of Melbourne: Ashendene Dante
• The Wilson Art Gallery and Museum: The Ashendene Press
• Cambridge University Library: Historical Printing Room