The Inscriptions at Tor House and Hawk Tower. by STUART,…

The imprint of Gloria Stuart, possibly best known for her role as the elderly Rose in the film Titanic. She began printing late in life, buying a Vandercook proof press and accumulating type including Bruce Rogers’ Centaur type and Frederick Warde’s Arrighi type. She was most enamoured by Rudolf Koch’s Antiqua of which she acquired an almost complete range. She began printing broadsides but soon moved onto books, her first being Enishi. In Matrix vol. 8 Ward Ritchie describes her books as “ingenious in their concept and each one quite different”.

In her early life Gloria had lived in an artists’ colony in Carmel and as Ritchie says, she began to revive some of her memories there in her projects for her press Imprenta Glorias. She was especially exercised by Robinson Jeffers who had lived in and wrote about the area, and his poetry had held great importance in her life. Jeffers had painstakingly built a stone house called ‘Tor’ as well as tower he called ‘Hawk’ on a point overlooking the coast, personally dragging up the boulders he used from the shore. On the beams and archways he painted or carved quotations which appealed to him for his wife and twin sons. Gloria Stuart gathered these together for this book which give an insight into Jeffers and his inspirations.