Binding for Aucassin and Nicolette

Designed by Jessie M. King

[1908]

Paper with colour printing

7 x 3¼ inches

This is one of the ‘envelope books’ issued by Foulis in the period from 1890 to around 1920. The cover design by Jessie M. King is typical of the decorative and highly stylised images which emanated from the Glasgow School of Art, although the format and idiom is also heavily influenced by the binding designs of Housman and Ricketts. The arrangement of forms in distinct planes, with contrasts of texture and line, is a device borrowed from King’s work as a jeweller. Her monogram appears, in tiny writing, in the bottom left hand corner.

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Photograph and text by Simon Cooke.

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