LEIGHTON, Clare. ~ The Farmer’s Year. A Calendar of English Husbandry.
Written with 31 wood engravings by Clare Leighton. First edition. Oblong folio, original green cloth with lettering and image by Leighton in gilt on upper cover, in the original Leighton designed dust jacket which matches the endpapers. Cloth faded at the very edges, unclipped jacket chipped at head and tail of spine and with a few small spots but generally a very good copy.
In words and spectacular large wood engravings, Leighton gives a monthly account of rural agricultural life in 1930s England from the perspective of farm workers. A remarkable and radical production in a time when farm labourers were in a period of low wages and depression. Leighton lived among the workers in Buckinghamshire in order to get as close as possible to their lives and present it the wider world in this impressive way.
In Gollancz’s publicity for this work, Gill is quoted as writing “Bewick and Raverat have done little engravings that are big in spirit, but no one in our time has succeeded better than Clare Leighton in penetrating the breath of the life of the earth on a scale so grand.”