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The Quince Tree Press

This is the name Carr gave to his Press. There was quince tree in the front garden of his house at 27 Mill Dale Road in Kettering.

There is no company registered at Companies House with this name. J.L. Carr did not print this name on any map or small book other than The History of the Quince Tree Press and on the title page of the five novels that he published. In all other publications Carr only used his name and address, and sometimes printed a pictorial colophon. Carr's colophons can be seen here.

The History of the Quince Tree Press gives very little information about the Press itself, it is simply a list of most of his publications and reproductions of articles by Carr about publishing and one about Carr as a novelist. If the Press was 21 years old in 1987 then it must have been established in 1966, two years after Carr had published his first small book.

In the five novels that Carr published from the Quince Tree Press, he always cited an edited extract from the words of Beatrice Warde, née Beatrice Becker, an American typographer:

This is a Printing Office,

Cross-roads of civilisation,

Refuge of all the Arts against the Ravages of Time.

From this place Words may fly abroad

Not to perish as waves of sound but fix'd in Time,

Not corrupted by the hurrying hand but verified in Proof.

Friend, you are on Safe Ground:

This is a Printing Office.

These words were written by Warde for the Monotype Corporation, a British company that recruited her in 1927. She wrote them in 1932 to be printed in upper case letters on a broadsheet to illustrate the new typeface Perpetua designed by Eric Gill, her lover.

Beatrice Warde (1900-1969)

It is interesting to note that Carr changed sacred to safe, probably for religious reasons.

You can see a reproduction of the original broadsheet in Perpetua here.

These words can be found on a bronze plaque at the entrance to Building 3 of the United States Government Publishing Office in Washington, D.C.

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