The Ashendene Press was a small private press

Private press

Private press is a term used in the field of book collecting to describe a printing press operated as an artistic or craft-based endeavor, rather than as a purely commercial venture...

 founded by Charles Henry St John Hornby (1867–1946). It operated from 1895 to 1915 in Chelsea, England, and was revived after the war

World War I

World War I , which was predominantly called the World War or the Great War from its occurrence until 1939, and the First World War or World War I thereafter, was a major war centred in Europe that began on 28 July 1914 and lasted until 11 November 1918...

 in 1920. The press closed in 1935.

Most Ashendene editions used one of two font

Font

In typography, a font is traditionally defined as a quantity of sorts composing a complete character set of a single size and style of a particular typeface...

s which were specially cast for the Press: Subiaco, which was based on a fifteenth-century Italian type cast by Sweynheim and Pannartz in Subiaco, Italy

Subiaco, Italy

Subiaco is a town and comune in the Province of Rome, in Lazio, Italy, from Tivoli alongside the river Aniene. It is mainly renowned as a tourist and religious resort for its sacred grotto , in the St. Benedict's Abbey, and the other Abbey of St. Scholastica...

, and to a lesser extent Ptolemy. Some Ashendene books, such as that by St. Francis of Assisi shown here, were illustrated with wood-engravings, but the majority were printed solely using type.

External links

• Image of Ashendene's edition of The Faerie Queene
  The Faerie Queene
  The Faerie Queene is an incomplete English epic poem by Edmund Spenser. The first half was published in 1590, and a second installment was published in 1596. The Faerie Queene is notable for its form: it was the first work written in Spenserian stanza and is one of the longest poems in the English...
  
  , located at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee.