JUNE 19-AUGUST 18 2006

THE BOOK CLUB OF CALIFORNIA PRESENTS

EDWARD GORDON CRAIG: THE MASK & THE PAGE FROM THE COLLECTION OF DR. ADELA SPINDLER ROATCAP

On view willl be The Book Club of California's copy of the Cranach Press' Hamlet which had once been the property of Sir William Rothenstein, who, in 1904 first introduced Edward Gordon Craig to Count Harry Kessler. About this book Dr. Roatcap wrote:

"Take up a copy of The Tragedie of Hamlet Prince of Denmarke, printed and published by the Cranach Press and you have before you the physical embodiment of the greatest drama in the English language. In this book the text of the play is framed by its own history – marginal texts presenting early versions of the story allow you to make a choice: to read the play alone without its precursors, or to steep yourself in the anthropology of Hamlet in the original languages.

Have you questions about the meaning of Elizabethan words, or obscure passages? Additional scholarly information is readily available. . . .

Everything in the book echoes the monumentally of the play: the size of the folio pages are in accord with its importance, yet they do not overwhelm: the proportions are classic – and as you turn the pages, if you are reading one of the 300 copies on handmade Monval paper, you experience its rich, dense but soft texture, on which red headlines and captions abate the austerity of the type. Here and there, as your eyes follow the story, the illustrations by Edward Gordon Craig take the place of the actors on the stage, and if you do not wish to read, you may follow the action in Craig's woodcuts page by page. As the drama builds in the architecture of Shakespeare's words and scenes, so in the page layout you experience the tension and balance between type and illustration, between reading and pictorial imagination."

"The Book as Theatre: Edward Gordon Craig and the Cranach Press 'Hamlet'," Fine Print, The Review for the Art, Vol. 14, #1, 1988, pp. 26-33