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Hardcover 1st edition in this format, 4th impression. The book itself, with blue boards and silver titles, is in excellent shape. The dust jacket a little edgeworn and rubbed, and is price clipped. Last Essays was published posthumously by Jonathan Cape in London in 1942, two years after Eric Gill's death in November 1940. It is a slender volume of roughly 93 pages, illustrated with woodcuts and engravings, and carries an introduction by Gill's wife, Mary. The book brings together a collection of pieces written in the final period of Gill's life, some of which had not previously appeared in print. The contents include essays on Art, Work, Private Property, Education for What?, Peace and Poverty, Art in Education, Five Hundred Years of Printing, The Leisure State, and Secular and Sacred in Modern Industry.The essays are characteristic of Gill's broader intellectual project: a sustained attack on industrialism, the dehumanization of labour, and the separation of art from everyday working life. Gill was prophetic in his predictions about industrialism and capitalism, and deeply insightful on the relation of art to work, culture, industry, and God. Running through the collection is the argument that mechanized mass production had reduced the worker to a subhuman condition, stripping labour of its dignity and meaning. Gill believed that a genuine civilization could only be built on the foundation of craftwork, in which the hand and the mind remained united in the making of useful and beautiful things. These were not new ideas for Gill, but the essays in this volume represent his final articulation of them, written as his health was failing and as Europe descended into the Second World War, circumstances that lent his warnings about the consequences of industrial capitalism an additional urgency. The book went through multiple impressions, a measure of its readership during the war years, when questions about the nature of work, the relationship between the individual and the state, and the moral foundations of civilization were very much on people's minds. In 1947, Last Essays was brought together with an earlier collection, In a Strange Land, in a single volume presenting the first complete collection of Gill's essays.Eric Gill was born on February 22, 1882, in Brighton, Sussex, and died on November 17, 1940, in Uxbridge, Middlesex. He was a British sculptor, engraver, typographic designer, and writer, especially known for his elegantly styled lettering and typefaces and the precise linear simplicity of his stone carving.After an inventory following his death, his output was found to include over 750 carved inscriptions, more than 100 stone sculptures and reliefs, 1,000 engravings, several typeface designs, and 300 printed works including books, articles, and pamphlets.Gill was also a deeply controversial figure. In his personal diaries, Gill described his sexual abuse of his adolescent daughters, an incestuous relationship with at least one of his sisters, and bestiality. This aspect of Gill's life was little known beyond his family and friends until the publication of the 1989 biography by Fiona MacCarthy. Since those revelations, his legacy has been fiercely debated. Some institutions have removed or recontextualized his work; others continue to display it while acknowledging his crimes. The tension between the unquestionable significance of his artistic and typographic achievements and the gravity of his personal conduct remains unresolved. Regarding his wife Mary, Her contribution to Last Essays, the brief introduction she wrote for the 1942 volume, represents one of the few occasions on which her own voice entered the public record. As the person closest to Gill throughout his adult life and working career, she was uniquely placed to provide context for these final writings. The introduction allowed her to frame her late husband's last essays for readers who were encountering his ideas in the aftermath of his death, and to.
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