Paul Nash 'Dorset: Shell Guide' Architectural Press, London, 1936

Paul Nash ‘Dorset: Shell Guide’ 1936. Original Spiro Wire Binding and photographic card covers. First Edition. The seventh Shell Guide edited by John Betjeman. Compiled by Paul Nash with Nash’s black & white photographs and reproductions of paintings on peach coloured paper, including a work by John Piper, a single page Shell advert designed by Edward Bawden and 2 colour maps. Betjemen invited a range of artists to contribute to the important Shell Guide series. One of the most scarce and desirable guides of the series, Nash’s, ‘Dorset: Shell Guide’ is considered to be the best of the pre-war examples.

Writing in Issue 10 of the British Art Studies Journal, Anna Reid writes "Dorset was a revelation for Nash, as presented in the artist’s 1936 Dorset: Shell Guide, one of a series produced for motorists, which closely articulates his sense of the landscape as a geological and surrealist object. In it, he describes seeing “Charlbury at twilight—cut against the afterglow, as to experience an almost unnerving feeling of the latent force of the past.”

Reference: Anna Reid, "Paul Nash’s Geological Enigma", British Art Studies, Issue 10, https://doi.org/10.17658/issn.2058-5462/issue-10/areid

Publisher: Architectural Press, London
Date of Publication: 1936
Binding: Spiral-bound
Pages: 46pp
Size: 8vo. Gazetteer
Condition: Slight creasing to covers, edgewear, a little rubbing around the spiral binding, title page with discrete pencil annotations, otherwise very good.
Product ID: RB00492