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The Church's Floral Kalandar Rare Book Circa 1861

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The Churchs Floral Kalandar Rare Book Circa 1861 The Churchs Floral Kalandar Emily Cuyler W R Tymms %%alt5%% %%alt6%%
This is very interesting and quite rare book in an attractive binding and would appeal to those with religious, botanical and illuminated manuscript interests.

Each of the 29 pages dedicated to a particular flower, contain a large illuminated panel of the flower, a bible verse and two poems, as well as more coloured embellishments, please see the two examples shown.


The Church's Floral Kalandar (yes, that is the correct spelling) was compiled by Emily Cuyler, with a preface by Rev. F. Shelley Cuyler. The illuminations were designed and chromolithographed by W. R. Tymms. It is a hardback, with gilt blind-stamped decorative spine and front board, blind-stamped back board and gilt edged leaves. The front board bearing roundels to Saints Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, with a central cross bearing two diagonals with the inscription Consider the lilies of the field. First blank page with foxing, otherwise none in rest of book. Tight binding. 38 leaves illuminated heavy card and unpaginated. Published by Day & Son, Lithographers to the Queen. This book undated, although we have seen another copy with identical boards, which is listed as a first edition.

Bears inscription to front end paper and first blank page : Ellen Baxendale Totteridge 1871.. Ellen Baxendale 1831-1910 was the wife of Lloyd Baxendale, Magistrate and Partner in Pickfords. They lived at this time in the
Grade II listed mansion Totteridge House, Totteridge, Near Barnet. London N20.

William Robert Tymms (1828–78) is best known as a chromolithographer and illuminator who embellished a series of extravagantly coloured books for Day and Son, the foremost publisher of this sort of material in the mid-Victorian period. The company also employed him to design book covers for the volumes in which his lithographs appeared. Three titles can be identified with certainty, which the artist signed: Tennyson’s May Queen (1861), Florence Lacomb’s Indian Fables [1863], and Jane Euphemia Browne’s The Child: from The Dove on the Cross (1863). In an age when binding designers claimed authorship in tiny gilt initials (‘AW’ for Albert Warrren, for example), each of these works is marked on the front cover as ‘W R Tymms, inv. et del’ (‘Tymms designed and drew this’).

It is also likely, as Douglas Ball remarks in Victorian Publishers’ Bindings, that he designed several ‘other splendid but unsigned covers for the same firm’ (92). Knowledge of this situation is bound to remain speculative, but it is possible to attribute some bindings stylistically, and in relation to work practices of the time.

Tymms’s authorship of covers which are unsigned is plausible, given that Day and Son typically engaged their designers to create the binding. For example, Robert Dudley produced the illustrations and cover for The Atlantic Telegraph (1866), and Owen Jones did the same for Paradise and the Peri (1860) and The Grammar of Ornament (1856). Of course, these were the prime designers, while Tymms was usually the technician engaged in converting the illustrations into chromolithographs and not the originator of the images. However, there seems to have been some flexibility in this arrangement, with the publisher willing to entrust Tymms with the task of designing the cover even when he was limited to the role of transcribing the work of others. He was the technician translating Lacomb’s illuminations into chromos for the Indian Fables, but designed the binding and he converted L. Summerbell’s [Mrs Hartley’s] illustrations into prints for The May Queen, and designed that cover as well.

If this logic holds true, it is reasonable to assume that the same practice was at work in creating bindings for other anonymous covers which enclosed his chromolithographs. It is quite likely that Tymms produced two liveries for Matthew Digby Wyatt’sThe Art of Illuminating (1861), and another one for a condensed version of the same book which was issued as The History, Theory, and Practice of Illuminating [1860]. His collaborations with the architects William and George Audsley may likewise have been characterized by work in which he transcribed the illuminations and designed the bindings. Ball conjectures that the Audsleys’ version of Byron’s Prisoner of Chillon (1865) is enclosed in a cover by Tymms (caption, facing 55), and is equally possible that he was the designer of the variant bindings for the Audsleys’ Sermon on the Mount [1861, 1875]. Other pieces, possibly by Tymms, include the casings for Pensées Choisies [1862], for which he chromolithographed designs ‘par M. Simpson’, and another for Keble’s Morning Hymn [1861], with illuminations by ‘BBB’.

But what of the books where he designed the chromolithographs as well as creating the illuminations? In the case of these volumes it again quite likely that he did the bindings as well. A precedent is provided by his signed work for Jane Euphemia Browne’s The Child: from The Dove on the Cross (1863), for which he drew the illuminations, converted them into colours, and designed the covers. Again, if logic holds true it is probable that he created the unsigned exterior for at least one other book in which he is known to have to have been the author of the illuminations and their execution: The Church’s Floral Kalandar. This binding is stylistically linked to the illuminations appearing inside and is harmonized with their effects.

Size: 24.5cm x 19.5cm

Condition: Very good condition. Please soo photos.
Price
£120.00  UK
$149.20  USA
139.60  EU
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Date Circa 1861  Mid Victorian Antiques Material Card Origin English Item code as237a2384 Status For Sale

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