Golden Cockerel Press

The Golden Cockerel Press was a major English fine press operating between 1920 and 1961.

The private press was famous for beautiful handmade limited editions of classic works produced to the very highest of standards. The type was hand-set and the books were printed on handmade paper, and sometimes on vellum. A major feature of Golden Cockerel books was the original illustrations, usually wood engravings, contributed by, among others, Eric Gill, Robert Gibbings, John Buckland Wright, Blair Hughes-Stanton, Agnes Miller Parker, David Jones, Mark Severin, Dorothea Braby, Lettice Sandford, Gwenda Morgan, and Eric Ravilious. The press was credited with having made a significant contribution to the revival of the British tradition of wood engraving.

The Golden Cockerel Press was founded by Harold (Hal) Midgley Taylor (1893-1925) in 1920 and was first in Waltham St Lawrence in Berkshire where he had unsuccessfully tried fruit farming. Taylor bought an army surplus hut and assembled it in Waltham St Lawrence as a combined workshop and living quarters. The Press was set up as a cooperative with four partners, Hal Taylor, Bee Blackburn, Pran Pyper, and Ethelwynne (Gay) Stewart McDowall. In April 1920 Hal Taylor and Gay McDowall had married. The four initially lived at Taylor's mother's house in Beaconsfield and cycled daily to the hut in Waltham St Lawrence. It was Taylor who persuaded his family trust to provide most of the capital (approximately £2,800) for printing presses et al.

Their first prospectus proclaimed: This press is a co-operative society for the printing and publishing of books. It is co-operative in the strictest sense. Its members are their own craftsmen, and will produce their books themselves in their own communal workshops without recourse to paid and irresponsible labour. Their first publications were The Voices, a literary review, and Adam & Eve & Pinch Me, short stories by a new author, A. E. Coppard, which was a critical success and sold well. Unfortunately the mood of idealism of the first prospectus did not last long. Proof-reading, for example, had been poor, which upset the authors. By summer 1921 Blackburn and Pyper had left and the co-operative became a more conventional private press when Frank Young, Albert Cooper and Harry Gibbs were employed. In 1923 the press published The Wedding Songs of Spenser with colour wood engravings by Ethelbert White, the first illustrated book from the press and a foretaste of editions to come.

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