Edward Bawden's scrapbook: a wondrous almanac of one man’s sensibility

The collected scrapbooks of the artist and designer Edward Bawden bulge with interest and beauty

In the post, something fantastic arrives: the scrapbooks of the artist and designer Edward Bawden, gathered together between hard covers for the first time thanks to a collaboration between the Fry Gallery in Saffron Walden, the publisher Lund Humphries, and Peyton Skipwith and Brian Webb, whose job it was to edit them. It’s a publication that feels at once both long overdue – Bawden died in 1989 – and timely: thanks, perhaps, to the Dulwich Picture Gallery’s recent retrospective of the work of Bawden’s friend, Eric Ravilious, interest in the group of artists who lived in Great Bardfield, Essex, has probably never been higher.

Here are the bowls he ordered from the potter Michael Cardew, here the anthropomorphic snails he drew for his children

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