Tripp under sail

Dur­ing the 1920s the skilled ama­teur artist and writer Her­bert Alker Tripp pro­duced three charm­ing volumes record­ing his wan­der­ings under sail around the east and south coasts of Eng­land, pro­fusely illus­trated with his mas­ter­ful and evoc­at­ive pen draw­ings. Over the years fac­sim­ile reprints had been made, but these suffered from the same cramped page lay­out as the ori­gin­als, and per­haps it was time for a new treat­ment which gave the draw­ings more room to breathe.

A curi­ous lim­it­a­tion was that the aver­age num­ber of words per page could not be increased, as this would res­ult in too few pages to hold all the draw­ings. I decided on a much lar­ger page size which would hold the por­trait-format draw­ings in wide mar­gins, and lend the books a more lux­uri­ous feel than they had enjoyed before. An extra touch was cre­ation of illu­min­ated cap­it­als for the chapter open­ings, derived from a square of ‘sea tex­ture’ from one of the draw­ings. Click below to read a few pages.