Artists’ Choice Editions / Inky Parrot Press — Promotional Broadsheet, c.2006

Title: Artists’ Choice Editions
Publisher: Inky Parrot Press / Artists’ Choice Editions
Place: The Foundry, Church Hanborough, Oxford
Date: c.2006
Edition: First edition
Format: Folding promotional broadsheet
Size: 60 × 34.4 cm
Stock Code: 004191
Location: Ephemera Drawer, Bookroom
Sleeve: Design A

First edition of this large and attractive promotional broadsheet for Artists’ Choice Editions and the associated Inky Parrot Press, issued from The Foundry at Church Hanborough, Oxford, around 2006. Printed in colour on one side and folded twice, the sheet advertises a representative group of recent private-press publications and is illustrated throughout with reproductions from the books themselves.

The broadsheet provides a particularly useful snapshot of the press at an active and ambitious point in its development. Among the works advertised are Selwyn Goodacre’s All the Snarks; Lewis Carroll’s The Hunting of the Snark, illustrated by John Vernon Lord; Writers and Artists of the Dorset Coast; Shadowland; Beatrice d’Este; A Book of Months; The Predatory Bite of the Steel Nib; The Summer House; Goblin Market; Acrostics; and A Lifetime of Drawing: The Sketchbook Drawings of Rigby Graham. Several of these were highly limited illustrated editions produced with specialist printers, binders and artists, and the sheet records both standard and special issues together with contemporary prices.

The publication is particularly revealing in showing how the Inky Parrot Press and Artists’ Choice Editions combined private-press traditions with contemporary illustration and book arts. The Parrot presses had evolved through several incarnations under Dennis Hall, beginning with the Inky Parrot Press at Oxford Polytechnic and later continuing as Hanborough Parrot Press, Previous Parrot Press and, from 1999, the revived Inky Parrot Press. Artists’ Choice Editions emerged in 2003 as a further collaborative publishing venture. A contemporary account by Hall notes that the Artists’ Choice imprint developed from publicity work connected with an Edward Ardizzone selling exhibition organised by Carol Manheim.

The broadsheet is also bibliographically useful because it preserves contemporary publication details, formats and prices for a group of specialist illustrated books which are now widely dispersed among private collections and libraries. The works promoted involve artists and illustrators including John Vernon Lord, Rigby Graham, Anne Cathcart, Sylvia Stokeld and others, and demonstrate the press’s continuing commitment to small editions, hand-colouring, specialist bindings and artist-led book production.

The present example is in near fine condition, with only very slight rubbing and otherwise fresh, clean surfaces. The folds remain sound and the colour illustrations and typography are bright and well preserved. Now housed in a clear acetate sleeve, Design A, for protection.

Near fine.

A desirable piece of modern British private-press ephemera, documenting the output of the Inky Parrot Press and Artists’ Choice Editions at a particularly productive moment and illustrating the continuing vitality of artist-led book production in the early twenty-first century.

Stock code: 004191. Location: Ephemera Drawer, Bookroom. Sleeve Design A.

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