The Ideal Book or Book Beautiful: A Tract on Calligraphy Printing and Illustration & on the Book Beautiful as a Whole. Together with: Ecce Mundus: Industrial Ideals and the Book Beautiful by Cobden-Sanderson, T.J - 1902

Hammersmith: Doves Press; Hammersmith Publishing Society, 1902. Two octavo volumes. (iv) 10pp.; (40)pp. The Ideal Book is one of 300 copies and is George Parker Winship's copy, with his bookplate to the front paste-down. Only the second title to have been issued by the Doves Press, the essay by Cobden-Sanderson outlines how the three titular elements combine to form "the ideal book" and recounts how the art of the book had declined until William Morris revived it by bringing these elements together again. Fine in gilt-stamped vellum, bound at the Doves Bindery. Ecce Mundus was printed by the Chiswick Press under the direction of Cobden-Sanderson for the Hammersmith Publishing Society, which was formed to publish "essays towards the formation of constructive ideals in politics, commerce & education." The book combines Cobden-Sanderson's "The Ideal Book" with his "Industrial Ideals." The latter essay sought to sketch "an Ideal which shall embrace, at once, the industrial life of the individual workman and industrial life as a whole, and to supplement the same by a conception...which shall unite into one vision or Ideal the forces of the universe and of man, and give to the forces of the latter the dignity and constancy and rhythm which we associate with the forces of the former." Fine in vellum-backed paper over boards, stamped in black on the spine. (Tomkinson, p. 52).