Folio Society Published Works Number 3250
Wells, H G and Alvin Langdon Coburn - The Door in the Wall Limited Edition
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Wells, H G and Alvin Langdon Coburn - The Door in the Wall Limited Edition (Published in by The Folio Society in 2016. This first ever full-sized facsimile is based on one of the extremely rare signed first printings and matches the original binding and production, including deckled edges and tipped-in photographs. This is number 637 of a limited edition of 1000 copies. 160 pages. Text printed on mould-made paper with deckled fore-edges. 10 plates, including a frontispiece, printed on Tatami and tipped in on two corners. Quarter-bound in cloth with paper sides; blocked in gold on front. Title label inset on spine. 15?× 11¼". Commentary volume has 40 pages with frontispiece photograph of Wells by Coburn. Typeset in Kennerley and printed on Munken Wove. 9½"× 6¼". Wells discussed the illustration of his collection of stories with the innovative London-based American photographer Alvin Langdon Coburn, a key figure in the pictorialist movement, in 1908. Two years later Coburn contacted the New York editor, publisher and gallery owner Mitchell Kennerley, and a limited edition of 600 copies was planned, with a new typeface by Frederic W. Goudy, set by his wife Bertha – the first major collaboration of author, photo-illustrator and typesetter in publishing history. Sixty copies, signed by Wells and Coburn, were distributed in London by Grant Richards, and it is from one of these extremely rare books that the Folio Society facsimile has been created. Coburn himself was subsequently adopted and championed by Wyndham Lewis and the Vorticists and went on to produce some of the first abstract photographs. His photogravures of London scenes in The Door in the Wall are especially evocative – a hauntingly beautiful counterpart to Wells’s text which subtly evoke the settings and subjects of these extraordinary stories )
