The front cover of Fiona McLeod's "The Immortal Hour", 1939.
This collection comprises approximately 500 books, pamphlets and ephemera, printed under the direction of Leonard Jay during the period 1926-1953 at the Birmingham School of Printing. In his teaching he advocated the application of the aesthetic principles of the Private Press and the Arts and Crafts Movements to the mechanical composition of commercial printing.
Among the holdings is a set of The Torch (1933-1950), the first issue of which contains a catalogue, with sample pages and illustrations, of the books published by the press 1925-33 and copies of photographs, advertisements and commercial stationery by the students.
Our copies of the School's work are in the wide range of original bindings and there are many limited editions such as:
- the quarto printing of The Song of Songs (1937), composed as a drama by Ernest Renan, with illustrations by Bernard Sleigh
- Selection from Ballads of Old Birmingham (1945), printed on laid paper
- Eight Poems by Thomas Bodkin, who was Professor of Fine Arts and the founding Director of the Barber Institute of Fine Arts in the University from 1935 until 1952, where he acquired the nucleus of one of the finest art collections of the Twentieth Century.
The complete output of the press is recorded in the bibliography of Leonard Jay (1963) by L. W. Wallis.