Glacial Errata, No. 73

[editor’s note: Almost as soon as I sent out last week’s newsletter on octopuses, news broke of a discovery of a brand new octopus! This one is tiny! It’s blue! It’s pretty neat! Check it out here!]

One

Alias Books East, in Atwater Village in Los Angeles, remains one of my very favorite bookstores in all the world, and whenever I’m in town I try to make a pilgrimage. There’s always weird, great things to find there. On a recent trip, I picked up The Typographic Bookplates of Ward Ritchie, Compiled by Melissa Beck. Ritchie, who was not someone I knew much about, did a lot of work for the libraries of Southern California, including the Huntington, the LA Public Library, and the Children’s Hospital of LA, in addition to numerous private collections (he also apparently worked at Vroman’s for a time). Beck, unfortunately, doesn’t offer much information about Ritchie, taking it for granted, I suppose, that the reader knows already about him, but a brief search yielded some basic information: he founded Ward Ritchie Press in 1935, publishing hundreds of books under his own design (including works by Robinson Jeffers, Carl Sandburg, and others), co-founded the Rounce & Coffin, an informal meeting place for Southern California bibliophiles, and succeeded, he later claimed, because he was “stupid enough not to be frightened.” Below are a selection of the bookplates, with commentary from Beck’s notes.

1934. “Efird is an elusive figure. Judging from this glamorous dressing-room scene, she had embarked on a career in stage or screen, which, however, has not been recorded in any sources available.”

Two

1935. “A geologist, author, and professor at USC, John Hodgdon Bradley (1898-1962) was the author of Farewell Thou Busy World, illustrated with wood engravings by Paul Landacre and published by Ritchie over the Primavera Press imprint in 1935. One of Landacre’s wood engravings was reused to decorate this bookplate.”

Three

1936. “Beatrice Thompson was a local Los Angeles bookbinder, an occupation evoked by this illustration reproduced from a sixteenth-century book of trades.”

Four

1938. “Printed by Ritchie from a wood engraving by Landacre; in black on cream-colored paper. Dated 1938 in Lehman’s Paul Landacre: A Life and a Legacy.”

Five

1988. “Printed in black on cream-colored paper, with reproductions of two small Paul Landacre wood engravings. This label can be found inside the books selected by the Rounce & Coffin Club as the best to be produced in the western states during 1988.”