• Abstract and Figures
• Public Full-text

JAMES CUMMINS bookseller catalogue 113 The Derrydale Press james cummins bookseller catalogue 113 The Derrydale Press Preface by Jed Lyons. Introduction by Nat Worden To place your order, call, write, e-mail or fax: james cummins bookseller 699 Madison Avenue, New York City, 10065 Telephone (212) 688-6441 Fax (212) 688-6192 e-mail: [email protected] jamescumminsbookseller.com hours: Monday – Friday 10:00 – 6:00, Saturday 10:00 – 5:00 Members A.B.A.A., I.L.A.B. rear cover: item 156 terms of payment: All items, as usual, are guaranteed as described and are returnable within 10 days for any reason. All books are shipped UPS (please provide a street address) unless otherwise requested. Overseas orders should specify a shipping preference. All postage is extra. New clients are requested to send remittance with orders. Libraries may apply for deferred billing. All New York and New Jersey residents must add the appropriate sales tax. We accept American Express, Master Card, and Visa. Dedicated to the memory of sportsman and bibliophile Duncan Andrews (1935-2011) preface In the tumultuous period of American life beginning just before the Great Depression in 1927 and continu- ing until just before the expansion of the Second World War in 1941, The Derrydale Press published 169 books and 72 prints on such sporting subjects as fishing, bird shooting, foxhunting, and other field sports. Today these books and prints are the most valuable and most collectible sporting books and prints ever published in North America. Why? Eugene Virginius Connett, 3rd, the founder and principal owner of Derrydale, was a publishing genius. After graduating from Princeton in 1912, he briefly joined the family beaver hat-making business before striking out on his own as a fledgling book publisher and printer in Manhattan in 1927. Connett sought out the most respected outdoor writers of his day and convinced them to become Derrydale authors. He combined their words with the output of equally well-regarded artists and illustrators whose drawings, paintings, and etchings were beautifully reproduced on the fine Italian paper that Connett favored. Many of them also agreed to create original paintings that Connett repro- duced in numbered, limited edition prints using labor-intensive stone lithograph or aquatint printing methods. The hand-colored prints, usually produced in editions of 50 to 250, were signed and numbered in the original artist’s own hand. Most Derrydale books were also published in numbered, limited editions of 750 to 1,250 copies. Connett was painstaking in the design of each book, often creating the cover designs himself. No expense was spared in the selec- tion of cloths and paper, bindings and head- and footbands. Many had hand crafted endsheets, four color reproduc- tions, and, of course, the now famous Derrydale colophon of Diana, the goddess of hunting, on the title page. In the case of two dozen books, Connett produced magnificent numbered, deluxe editions bound in morocco leather and usually slipcased. These books have soared in value in recent years. Oddly enough, Gene Connett was virtually unknown to the clubby New York book publishing set in mid- town Manhattan. He was content to frequent the New York Anglers’ Club (still located in Fraunces Tavern in Wall Street) for lunch, certainly not the Century Club. And he commuted every day from his hometown of South Orange, New Jersey, where few publishers could be found. Nonetheless, this remarkably gifted publisher left behind a legacy of the greatest sporting book and printmaking enterprise in this country. Jed Lyons President, The Derrydale Press introduction Eugene Virginius Connett III (1891-1969) is best remembered as the founder of The Derrydale Press, the most celebrated publishing label in the history of American sporting books. He was also a renowned angler and field shot, a prolific author and artist, a mariner, a conservationist, a fly tier, a maker of duck decoys, and an inventor of sporting equipment, like a round, celluloid fly box that was light, waterproof, transparent, and could be carried conve- niently. “He was a true Renaissance man, able to do everything well; a complete extrovert, a boisterous roisterer with a rampaging sense of humor and a keen wit, a practical joker … and one who was almost always willing to stay up until the last dog was hung,” wrote another great sporting author, Sparse Grey Hackle, in a tribute to Connett after his death. Attempting to support one’s family by publishing sporting books is a quixotic endeavor at any time, but the fact that Connett sustained Derrydale through the darkest years of the Great Depression leaves little doubt that he was a man of extraordinary will and character. When he was married in 1913 after graduating from Princeton, Connett’s path in life looked entirely predict- able. He would run his family’s hat business and raise a family, but it was around this time that he began collecting books and his by-line became a fixture in journals like Field & Stream, The American Angler, Forest and Stream and The Sportsman. The first of ten books that he wrote, Wing Shooting and Angling, was published by Charles Scribner’s Sons in November 1922, and his boyhood pastimes of hunting and fishing became an adulthood obsession. Outdoor sports, meanwhile, were becoming a national obsession as well. With the postwar manufacturing boom in full flower and the U.S. economy in the throes of a speculative boom now remembered as the Roaring Twenties, men were finding more leisure time to fill with toys like boats, rods and guns. A cottage industry of sports publishing began to thrive as well, as demand for reading materials on these pursuits exploded. Connett, a self-proclaimed anglophile, was particularly influenced by artistic renderings of gentlemen’s sporting exploits coming from England, and he began dreaming of an American strain of fine sporting art. “It is easily understood that a great many Americans accepted England as the fountainhead of such sport,” Connett wrote. “As a matter of fact, England was. But after the World War we entered such a period as England did a century ago, and began to prove not only the equals, but often the superiors to our elder cousins.” Connett was anticipating the coming full eclipse of Great Britain as a global empire and the onset of the so-called “American century.” He also seemed to sense that along with America’s new industrial revolution and its ascension to global dominance would come a cultural backlash — a desire to preserve what was left of the wilderness, to celebrate its aesthetics and to partake in its grandeur. The Connett family hat business was liquidated in 1925, and after several months of fishing and reflection on the streams of New Jersey, young Gene shocked his family by becom- ing a printing salesman. His first client seems to have been the Workers Education Bureau Press of New York, which commissioned five thousand copies of The Living Constitution, eventually published in 1927 and reissued in 1928 by Macmillan. He also signed a deal to print one hundred copies of Mark Twain’s classic, 1601. Meanwhile, he was experimenting with fine amateur printing of his own. He acquired a small hand press and some Caslon 471 type that he installed in his library at home, which would eventually produce his most treasured work, Magic Hours. In the archives of The Derrydale Press, which now reside at the Princeton University Library, there are two proof pages dated March 1926 that are evidence of his initial foray. One is a proof of the first page of Fysshy- nge Wyth an Angle. A note attached to it says, “I planned to print a small edition of Fysshynge With An Angle on my press at home. […] I never finished the job.” The other proof states, “This is the only proof pulled from my type specimen which I set up myself before printing Magic Hours.” Magic Hours was the first book to bear the name Derrydale Press, and Connett wrote, illustrated, printed and bound a 100-copy edition of the book himself. He later remembered his wife’s despair as their library “soon took on the appearance of a small printing plant, with plenty of ink in places where it was not meant to be.” “He turned the house upside down; he had printed sheets laid out to dry in every room,” Mrs. Connett later told Sparse Grey Hackle. After producing 89 good copies, Connett saw that he had ruined his press — a consequence of using very hard Whatman’s Drawing Paper without dampening it before printing. The completed books were offered for sale to members of the Anglers’ Club of New York for $5 apiece, and Sparse wrote that there was little demand for them. Nobody, including Connett, kept track of where all the books went, and some twenty years later, word spread that a copy of Magic Hours had sold for $100 — sending members scrambling back home to their book- shelves to find their copy. After Connett’s death in 1969, Sparse recorded that the last known sale of a Magic Hours copy brought $300. It has been recently estimated that less than twenty copies of Magic Hours are known to still exist. A copy sold at Sotheby’s in 2001 for $17,000, and in 2007, a copy was auctioned for $43,700. In its fourteen years of operation under Connett, The Derrydale Press published 169 titles with several in two editions and one in three editions. The Press also produced around one hundred Sporting Prints, “Sporting Scraps” (smaller prints), and equestrian portraits on private commission.

Load more

  100

Copy Link