- INCLINE PRESS
- The Goat in the Henhouse is one of forty-five wood engravings done by Sven Ljungberg for Parvus
Simon Brett , in his review of Parvus in Multiples the Society of Wood Engravers Newsletter (Vol.4, no.5 Sept. 2000) writes:
"Sven Ljungberg (b. 1913) is one of Sweden's most distinguished artists, a painter and muralist as well as a printmaker. There are large decorative schemes by him in many public buildings and a museum devoted to his work in his home town of Ljungby. He has illustrated over 40 books and written about 20 of his own. In the 1940s, he produced large, meticulously engraved, rather austere portrait engravings. Most of his prints, however, including his book illustrations, are in a more robust, slightly choppy style and the 45 little images in Parvus, a memoir of some incidents in his childhood with a glimpse of the grown man musing upon them, have a perfect balance between almost careless handling and absolute fitness for purpose--that is the purpose of illustrating a book and the purpose of evoking time past. The book was first published in Sweden in 1971, the first of three volumes of autobiography. Its five chapters are carefully shaped as recollections though not so carefully shaped as stories would need to be and are thus in keeping with the images. Ljungberg presents himself as a slightly askance figure, the town's famous artist yet persistently at odds with the authorities, a loved but perhaps irritating eccentric. Whether this is wholly true or a bit of a literary construct, one cannot know, but the Introduction by Rosemary and Thorsten Sjölin gives a brief, attractive view of him from another angle.
It is brave of the always enterprising Incline Press to introduce Ljungberg to an English audience in this way, for in one sense this is probably a very Swedish book. Childhood memoirs are always attractive however, wherever they come from, and the book will please (and deserves) many readers."
Parvus is 64 pages with 45 wood engravings 10" x 6" and is printed on Zerkall paper. The text is set in Bodoni type. The engravings are printed from the wood in six different shades of black ink from Cranford Inks in order to contrast with the book black used for the text. Each copy has a frontispiece printed on Japanese Hosokawa paper, signed by Sven Ljungberg. The edition was of thirty specials and 175 regular copies.
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