{"title":"Rita Ricketts","description":null,"products":[{"product_id":"scholars-poets-and-radicals-book-rita-ricketts-9781851244256","title":"Scholars, Poets and Radicals","description":"The Blackwell Collections the archive of the well-loved bookselling and publishing company are full of surprises. There are warrior women no longer prepared to suffer the fate of a spellbound princess, scholarly apprentices giving themselves an Oxford education, and reluctant radicals publishing in protest against the authorities who sent so many to certain death in the Great War. Amid the many unknown authors the Blackwells published are famous names: J. R. R Tolkien, John Buchan, Wilfred Owen, John Betjeman, Dorothy L Sayers, Vera Brittain, Edith Sitwell, and Laurence Binyon, who is recollected whenever For the Fallen is read. But the memoirs, letters, and journals of ordinary people who worked for the family also deserve a hearing. The diary of Will King, a real-life Jude the Obscure, stands out. Its astonishing record of what he read and his mordant dissection of the texts amounts to a critique of English culture between 1910 and 1950. Together with the stories of three generations of B. H. Blackwells and their diverse associates, the book provides a panel of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century history far beyond Oxford.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ LIKE_NEW \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49545461858577,"sku":"GOR013126309","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49617571119377,"sku":"GOR006607265","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1851244255.jpg?v=1751185653"},{"product_id":"short-and-beautiful-life-book-rita-ricketts-9781911397298","title":"A Short and Beautiful Life","description":"Few have heard of the Shakespeare Head Press, although it ranks alongside William Morris's Kelmscott, Emery Walker and Cobden-Sanderson's Doves, Eric Gill's Golden Cockerel and St John Hornby's Ashendene. Its origins date to the 1860s, when a young Arthur Henry Bullen, dreamt of printing the whole of Shakespeare. Making his dream a reality, Bullen founded the Shakespeare Head Press in 1904 in an old Tudor house, where Shakespeare would have been a guest.There are many backstories associated with the Shakespeare Head Press and of the perennial dashed hopes of small presses', which plagued Bullen. When the Press passed to Basil Blackwell (1921), Bullen's mantle was assumed by the scholar-printer Bernard Newdigate. For twenty years, he produced a series of finely printed books, yet these were not commercially successful. Blackwell blamed the commodification of literature, and the metamorphoses of books from handcrafted works of art to manufactured objects.A Short and Beautiful Life reconstructs the lives of Bernard Newdigate and A.H. Bullen, and that of the Shakespeare Head Press. For Sir Basil Blackwell, 'the exact record of events was secondary to the universal truths it served to illustrate.' And there is something remarkably contemporary about them.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":49751004381457,"sku":"NGR9781911397298","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52127035359505,"sku":"NLS9781911397298","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/191139729X.jpg?v=1751446876"}],"url":"https:\/\/www.worldofbooks.com\/collections\/author-books-by-rita-ricketts.oembed","provider":"World of Books ","version":"1.0","type":"link"}