14 
House & Garden 
QUAINT COLOR PRINTS of THE VICTORIAN AGE 
Frontispiece and title page by 
George Baxter of a rare little 
volume, “The Artist or Young 
Ladies’ Instructor” by B. T. 
Gandee, 1835 
CAROLINE MORDAUNT; 
TMJK GCVISKH !K3S. 
BY MRS. SHERWOOD. 
which the ingenuity of George Bax¬ 
ter developed as an added achieve¬ 
ment to the peaceful arts of a glori¬ 
ous reign. 
Perhaps, dear reader, you too 
have a shelf of old books in your 
house, or shelves where the crowd¬ 
ing in of new ones has not relegated 
the old-fashioned volumes to the 
oblivion of an unintellectual attic. 
Well then, lose not a minute in searching their 
pages to find if they contain certain color illus¬ 
trations bearing the magic legend “Designed, 
Engraved and Printed by G. Baxter, Patentee 
of Oil Colour Printing, Patriot Office, Lon¬ 
don,” or, “Drawn and Engraved by G. Baxter, 
3 Charterhouse Square,” or, “Printed in Oil 
Colours by G. Baxter,” or other variations that 
indicate Baxter’s responsibility for their pro¬ 
duction. 
Many of these book-illustrations are minia¬ 
ture in size. Do not pass them with a care-' 
less glance! Ah, I told you so! One has only 
to do them the justice of scrutiny to become 
slave to their charm. What have we had be¬ 
fore (or since) that quite take their place? 
Neither the lithograph nor the modern photo¬ 
graphic color reproductions. The closer you 
look at a Baxter print the lovelier it is. One 
cannot say that of our present-day color-work, 
in so far as its processes are concerned. 
The Baxter Process 
The Baxter print in its earlier form was 
produced by the over-impressions of numerous 
Frontispiece by Baxter and title page of 
“Caroline Mordaunt, or The Governess," 
published by William Darton & Son, Lon¬ 
don, 1835 
The Products of the Ingenious George 
Baxter Now Eagerly Sought 
by Collectors 
GARDNER TEALL 
Illustrations by courtesy of Mr. George 
J. Beyer and from the author's collection 
W HO does not love the color-books of 
Randolph Caldecott, Kate Greenaway 
and Walter Crane? 
True, their original editions were late Vic¬ 
torian, in point of time, but so lovely and in¬ 
teresting were these beloved volumes of our 
mother’s nursery days that their popularity car¬ 
ried them over into our own and they still 
live for our children in perennial freshness. 
Occasionally those first editions may dis¬ 
cover themselves in out-of-the-way bookshops. 
When they do, they are irresistible! But how 
few of us know the story of their immediate 
ancestors, the Baxter prints! 
The Baxter Heritage 
The very process of printing in colors em¬ 
ployed by the famous printer of the Caldecott, 
Greenaway and Crane books,—Edmund Evans 
of London,—was a heritage from the early 
Victorian color-printer George Baxter, whose 
products were the marvel and delight not only 
of the children of the mid-third of 
the 19th Century, but of their elders 
as well, for George Baxter’s process 
color-prints were by no means con¬ 
fined to juvenile interest. 
Nearly every shelf of old books of 
the cosy family sort, which still re¬ 
pose in the old bookcases where their 
original owners placed them, will re¬ 
veal examples of this fascinating art 
“Chimborazo”, a Baxter print 
illustrating an 1850 edition of 
Humboldt’s “Views of Nature.” 
The impressions of this plate 
have variations 
