Decorated Covers
Roycroft Decorated/Illustrated Book Covers
An AHA! Moment – after 34 years of collecting Roycroft books, I recently noticed that all 5 of the hand-decorated/illustrated covers I’ve seen (4 in my collection), are all from 1896, the first year of the press, each is different, and all five covers were executed by C S (Clara Schlegel). Also, only copies of the first three (3) books of the press where treated thus. I suspect that these unusual covers are quite rare, and limited to only a very few of the 1896 publications. Given that variations/quirks/anomalies among Roycroft books seem to be the norm, it will be interesting to see if other examples emerge from obscurity. (Richard Blacher 2012)