FABLE FOR ALL AGES: THE OLD WOMAN & THE EMPTY CASK.|A

Evanston, IL: Hesterberg Press, The, 2015. dark purple Japanese cloth with gold stamped paper label on cover. Hesterberg Press. 8vo. dark purple Japanese cloth with gold stamped paper label on cover. unpaginated. First edition, limited to 72 numbered copies. A fine copy.



This latest and unplanned work from the Hesterberg Press, titled A Fable for All Ages, is a wonderful accident. Earlier this year (2015), while sorting through a box of Troya paper used by R. Hunter Middleton to print his Bewick blocks, I discovered over seventy printed sheets of The Old Woman and The Empty Cask.



Knowing that Middleton had printed some fable blocks for Graham Williams and his Florin Press in England in 1980, I contacted Graham and learned that he had indeed run short of this particular fable and had requested more copies.



This fortunate discovery, illustrating a very charming age fable by Galus Julius Phaedrus, is presented here and includes two other Bewick vignettes printed damp, in addition to the Middleton print which is laid in. This letterpress work explores the long and fascinating history of the fable, Aesop, Phaedrus, British Fabulists of note and Bewick's special interest in the fable genre.



The following descriptive excerpt, used by Bewick, is taken from the Application of The Old Woman and the Empty Cask Written in 1778 by Samuel Croxall in his "Fables of Aesop and Others": "Phaedrus was an old man when he wrote his Fables, and this he applies to himself; intimating, what we ought to judge of his youth, when his old age was capable of such productions...".