Eric Gill

Hardcover. Near Fine/Near Fine. Faber & Faber, London, 1989, first edition; 8vo, 160 x 240mm; pp xiii, 338; black cloth, pictorial dust wrapper; profusely illustrated with 129 photographic plates and with several more line drawings or other illustrations in the text; this is a copy in excellent, unblemished condition. ... ... ... ... Gill was an outstanding artist-craftsman, a sculptor, typographer, lettersmith and a wood engraver. At the same time his life was complex and widely misunderstood, this in part on account of not only his views towards but his urgent and wide practice of sex, much of it quite contrary both to his publicly expressed views on morality and to the morality advocated by the Anglican church of his upbringing of the Catholic church to which he later converted. MacCarthy's fine biography shows well Gill's complex and often contradictory personality and behaviour, in particular getting behind the public man to the essential person struggling behind the screen. This not in any way to show him as a hypocrite but rather as a deeply moral person seeking to understand and make sense of he word and society in which he and others lived.