- Nieuwkoop : HES & DE GRAAF 1967
- 8vo
- cloth
- xv, 428 pages.
- ISBN 9789060041178 / Order Nr. 103593
- Price: $ 155.00

Printed in an edition of 300 numbered copies, set in 12-point Fournier on Zerkall mould-made paper, with 50 copies half bound in Oasis leather and containing a separate portfolio of engraving proofs. Bound by the Fine Bindery. Introduction by Peter Jerrome. With an essay after the text, "Gwenda Morgan, Engraver," by Miriam Macgregor. Gwenda Morgan (1908-1991) was one of England's foremost pastoral engravers. Her wood-engravings of the Sussex countryside where she was born and lived all her life are brilliantly conceived and executed; notable among the books she illustrated is her Gray's Elegy, commissioned by Christopher Sandford for the Golden Cockerel Press in 1946, and which he acknowledged to among his favorites. A key influence in Gwenda's work was the time she spent in the Women's Land Army from 1939-46. Many jobs were still then done by hand, and her scenes of milking, ploughing, haymaking, harvesting, and harrowing are largely based on her experiences working on the South Downs, often with horse in place of tractor. Only after Gwenda's death in 1991 did the diary that she kept every day throughout the war come to light. It records her everyday life on the farm, her fondness for the animals, her occasional puzzlement over the behavior of the Sussex farmers she worked for, and her dislike for Hitler, whose bombers passed overhead on their way to London during the blitz. This is an engrossing first-hand account of the hardships of wartime Britain, illustrated throughout with thirty-one keenly observant engravings of the countryside and farming, and two pages of photographs, including one of Gwenda hoeing, taken on 12 June 1940. With a checklist of books illustrated by Gwenda Morgan. "Poultry twice. Docking. A lot of excitement just before tea. Bombs dropping around, and machine-gunning. I saw bombs drop while docking, and ran down under the spruce trees so as not to get machine-gunned. They seemed to be down Duncton and Petworth station direction, and machine-gunning nearer the town too. All very nasty" (Feb. 10, 1943). Small bump to slipcase, with no damage to book.