[Alan Lansdown Tabor, Manchester calligrapher.] Pamphlet ‘Designed by Alan Tabor’, printed in red and black: ‘Character of a Happy Life. / by Sir Henry Wotton’. Ornately laid out in Arts and Crafts style, with three illustrations.

See the recent biography by Colin Porter, ‘Alan Tabor: the Life and Work of a Master Calligrapher and Illuminator’ (Cock and Bull Press, 2022). Tabor’s family donated his papers to the Rylands Library in Manchester, which provides a useful short biography. Excessively scarce: no other copy of this item traced, either on WorldCat, JISC, or ViaLibri. Seven unpaginated pages, 16mo. The pages are printed in red and black on the same side of a folio sheet of thick wove paper, that has been cut into two, and then folded to make two sections like bifoliums, but with the internal parts blank. The sections are now detached from one another, with the remains of the red ribbon used to bind them together present along the gutter of the central opening. In fair condition, with a little light discoloration along the inner edge of the front cover. The title is on the cover, along with an illustration of a farmer and his wife and child, beneath which is printed ‘Designed by ALAN TABOR’. Pp. 2, 3, 5 and 6 present, in a vulgarized William Morris pseudo-medieval Arts and Crafts style, with the customary elaborate capitals, the six four-line stanzas of Wotton’s poem (first stanza: ‘How happy is he born and taught / That serveth not another’s will; / Whose armour is his honest thought, / And simple truth his utmost skill!’). P. 4 has a full-page illustration, in elaborate border, of a young man and an old man sitting on a bench. P. 7 is a round illustration of a nineteenth-century in arm chairs, in elaborate red border, with ‘FINIS’ at the foot. See image.