Emery Walker

Walker, Emery (British photographer, typographer, and printer, 1851-1933)

LC Heading: Walker, Emery, 1851-1933

Biography:

Walker, Sir Emery (1851–1933), process engraver and typographer, was born at 10 Pickering Terrace, Paddington, Middlesex, on 2 April 1851, the eldest of the five children of Emery Walker (d. 1891), a coach builder, originally from Norfolk, and his wife, Mary Anne, née Barber. After receiving a little schooling at St Mark's College, Chelsea, he was obliged by the onset of his father's blindness in 1864 to earn his living. After a succession of more or less laborious occupations, the trend of his life was fixed by an encounter with Alfred Dawson, who had perfected ‘glyptography’, a form of etching devised in the 1840s by a certain Palmer. In 1872 Dawson founded the Typographic Etching Company, and in the following year Walker joined him. On 7 June 1877 Walker married Mary Grace (1849/50–1920), daughter of William Jones, an Inland Revenue supervisor. They had one daughter. Walker remained with Dawson's company until 1883, when he joined his brother-in-law, Robert Dunthorne, in business as a printseller and occasional publisher. Finding this change uncongenial, he returned in 1886 to his old pursuit and, in partnership with Walter Boutall, founded the firm of ‘process and general engravers, draughtsmen, map-constructors, and photographers of works of art’ known first as Walker and Boutall, later as Walker and Cockerell, and finally as Emery Walker, Ltd. Its office was at 16 Clifford's Inn, next door to the chambers of Samuel Butler, who became a close friend. The works were at a Georgian house not far from Walker's home in Hammersmith Terrace, London.

By good fortune there was another riverside dweller at Hammersmith who shared Walker's tastes to the full. This was William Morris. Their acquaintance, begun in 1883, quickly ripened into an affectionate comradeship which grew only the stronger as long as Morris lived. Although Morris was the more forceful character, each could tell the other much that he did not know, and they saw eye to eye on all important topics. In 1888 they joined Walter Crane and others in founding the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society, the parent stock from which many kindred societies sprang. At about the same period Walker was elected to the committee of the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings, founded in 1877 by Morris and Philip Webb. They were prominent in a group supporting the then young and unpopular socialist movement. As secretary to the Hammersmith Socialist Society, Walker's duty was to organize Sunday evening lectures, some of them by men afterwards famous.

Among the subjects in which they were both deeply interested was the art of typography, then at a low ebb. Out of the lecture on printing and illustration which Walker delivered at the Arts and Crafts Exhibition in 1888 and the seminal essay on typography which he wrote (and Morris expanded) for the exhibition catalogue, arose the Kelmscott Press, the first of the great private presses, which they established early in 1891 in modest premises close to Morris's Kelmscott House. Its output during the seven years of its existence was astonishing. It comprised fifty-two works in sixty-six volumes, all printed by hand, with type and ornaments designed by Morris and many illustrations drawn by Edward Burne-Jones and engraved on wood by W. H. Hooper. Walker declined to be a partner in this costly enterprise, having (he said) ‘some sense of proportion’ and no capital to risk. Nevertheless, he was all the while a virtual partner, and no important step was taken without his advice and approval. This was not the only field in which he co-operated with Morris.

Morris's death in 1896 was a crushing blow, but Walker continued his artistic labours more persistently than ever. In 1900, in conjunction with T. J. Cobden-Sanderson, he founded the Doves Press in a house in Hammersmith Terrace. For this renowned press a type of great beauty and legibility, based on the fifteenth-century Venetian type used by the Frenchman Nicolas Jenson, was cut from drawings made under Walker's eye. Unfortunately, after nearly twenty volumes had appeared, including the five volumes of an English Bible (1903–5), a profound disagreement caused the severance of the partnership, and from 1909 to the close of the Doves Press in 1916 Cobden-Sanderson carried it on alone.

The Kelmscott, Doves, and Ashendene presses will go down in typographical history as the stately precursors of the numerous private presses that followed them. Walker's name is inseparably connected with all three: together with Sydney Cockerell he was instrumental in guiding St John Hornby's choice of Subiaco type for his Ashendene Press. But his great reputation among students of typography rests on a far wider basis, for he was keenly preoccupied with the appearance of the everyday book, and not only with its rich relations. It is scarcely too much to say that his influence, direct or indirect, can be discerned in nearly every well-designed traditional typographical page that now appears, and that to him more than to any other man the twentieth century's great improvement in book production in Britain was due. Walker's exacting taste demanded close, even typesetting, perfect harmony between text and illustration, and excellent materials; above all he admired the finest incunabula. He also enjoyed considerable influence on German book design through his friendship with Count Harry Kessler, owner of the Cranach Press, and he designed a series of classics for Insel-Verlag. He later collaborated with the great American typographer Bruce Rogers in the production of two fine limited editions, published in 1917 and 1928. Walker was proud to be elected master of the Art-Workers' Guild in 1904. He was knighted in 1930, and in May 1933 was elected an honorary fellow of Jesus College, Cambridge. He delivered the Sandars lectures in bibliography at Cambridge University for 1924–5 entitled ‘Modern Printing’. Although his schooling ended at the age of thirteen, his erudition was extraordinary. So was his endless generosity in helping and advising others, combined with great modesty and a most lovable nature. He died at his home, 7 Hammersmith Terrace, on 22 July 1933. After cremation at Golders Green, Middlesex, the ashes were interred at Sapperton, Gloucestershire.

Sydney Cockerell, rev. John Trevitt

(Sydney Cockerell, ‘Walker, Sir Emery (1851–1933)’, rev. John Trevitt, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn, Oct 2007 [http://proxy.bostonathenaeum.org:2055/view/article/36687, accessed 25 April 2016])