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IMPRESSIONS OF WAR; THE MEMOIRS OF HERBERT HODGSON 1893-1974.
Hodgson, Bernard and Geoffrey M. Hodgson

- Rutland, UK : Martlet Books 2010 - 8vo - cloth, dust jacket - vi, 138 pages - Order Nr. 105869 - Price: $ 45.00 View Excerpt (PDF) View Table of Contents (PDF)

Limited to 300 copies. Born in South London in 1893, Herbert Hodgson is now regarded as "one of the great printers of the twentieth century". In the opening chapter of this book he gives a vivid account of life a century ago in the poorer areas of the capital.

After an apprenticeship as a printer, he served from 1915 to 1918 in France and Belgium in the First World War. His account of life and death in the trenches is moving and forceful. It is one of the few memoirs of the First World War that is not written by an officer and it provides a unique point of view from the other ranks.

In a battle in April 1918 he found a mud-encrusted Bible in a shell hole. Amazingly, 92 years later, the original owner of this Bible has been traced to Private Richard Cook from New Zealand.

From 1923-26 Herbert Hodgson printed the extremely rare subscribers edition of T. E. Lawrences Seven Pillars of Wisdom. Copies of this work now attract prices of up to US$80,000 each.



Hodgson then worked for nine years at the Gregynog Press in Mid-Wales where he created 24 more printing masterpieces. His period at Gregynog came to an end in 1936 because of lack of employment prospects for his growing family. He returned to London. Then came the Second World War and the London Blitz in which one of his sisters was killed.

His memoirs are a moving personal account of a master craftsman and his family facing the upheavals of the first half of the twentieth century.

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ALLERLEI ZIERAT by Schelter & Giesecke This encyclopedic specimen book of the Leipzig, Germany type foundry and printing supply house J.G. Schelter & Giesecke features, as the title indicates, all kinds of decoration for supplying printing of every type. On the title page, the firm boasts winning grand prize in 1900 in Paris (presumably at the Exposition Universelle). It is hard to do justice in a short description to the variety of styles (traditional, Jugenstil, etc.) and categories (certificates, letterheads, borders, ornaments, exotic motifs, flowers, animals, silhouettes, menus, greeting cards, vignettes humorous and otherwise, images of bicyclists, occupational symbols, portraits, Classical figures, religious art, heraldry, ships, trains, athletes, etc.) offered in this volume. Some of the examples are printed in color, most are in black-and-white. The Jugenstil cover of this copy shows minor wear and soiling. The plate of "Gust. Carlsson & Co., Stockholm" is attached to the front pastedown. A small fraction of pages show minor soiling, a pencil notation or a short closed tear. Two of the fold-outs at the back have a little more damage-one is missing a 1x2 inch piece along the margin, the other has a 3-inch closed tear and an edge which is crumpled.