Ashendene Press

views updated

Ashendene Press (ăsh´əndēn´), founded in 1895 at Ashendene, Hertfordshire, England, by Sir C. H. St. John Hornby and moved in 1899 to Chelsea, London. It was a leader (with the Kelmscott Press and the Doves Press) in the 19th-century revival of fine English printing. Its edition of Dante (1909) is considered an achievement comparable to the Kelmscott Chaucer of William Morris. The Subiaco type used by the Ashendene Press was designed by Sir Emery Walker and S. C. Cockerell from an early Italian typeface. The Ashendene Press, which set all of its editions by hand, issued 40 books in the years from 1895 to 1915 and from 1920 to 1935.

See W. Ransom, Kelmscott, Doves, and Ashendene (1952).