Ashendene Press
The Ashendene Press was a small private press founded by St John Hornby. It operated from 1895 to 1915 in Chelsea, and was revived after the war in 1920. The press closed in 1935.
Most Ashendene editions used one of two fonts 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, 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.
The wood engraver William Harcourt Hooper worked for them from about 1896.
The illustrator Florence Kingsford Cockerell illuminated an Ashendene edition of The Song of Songs Which Is Solomon's in 1901, varying the designs for each of the 40-odd copies in the edition.
