Tuesday 17 December 2013

Merry Christmas, War's Not Over


This intriguing lithographed bookplate is pasted onto the flyleaf of a copy of the artist A.S. Hartrick's 1939 autobiography A Painter's Pilgrimage Through Fifty Years. According to the inscription it was given by someone called Betty to Ivy G. Day and Gwendoline R. Harris, exactly 70 years ago, at Christmas 1943.

Inside: a well-lit room, books, cheerful prints on the walls, clean-lined modern furniture, sanctuary. Outside: desolation, the blackened ruins of the bombed city.

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