In 1937, the typographer and printer Will Carter sent a copy of his recently published edition of The Song of Solomon to the American calligrapher Paul Standard. Or rather, he tried to send a copy. US Customs impounded the book for impropriety and it took several months – and several letters – before Standard got his hands on the edition.
When he did, it became clear why he’d had to wait. Printed and published by Carter at his own Rampant Lions Press, The Song of Solomon features six linocut illustrations by Cambridge-based artist Harry Hicken. Opposite the opening of chapter one, a full page is dedicated to the thick black outlines of a man and woman, their lips pressed against each other.
She tips her head back and arches her spine, parts her legs and grips the sheets; he kneels, straddling her right thigh, pressing his fingertips into her hip. They are both nude. This is not the page to which The Song of Solomon is turned in the exhibition of Rampant Lions Press books at David Parr House in Cambridge.
Instead, viewers are treated to the opening of chapter six and an illustration of a solo woman, supine, wearing nothing but a grapevine bracelet, gazing away from us and into the linocut’s cloudy sky. ‘Who is she that looketh forth as the morning, fair as the moon, clear as the sun, and terrible as an army with banners?’ The biblical poem is set in Goudy Text, a blackletter typeface designed by the American type designer Frederic Goudy in 1928. Blackletter forms, .