page_title: Edmund Evans
section_title: Kate Greenaway
hierarchical_section_title: Edmund Evans / Children's books / Kate Greenaway
caption_attribution_description: English: Girl wearing a hat and a pale green dress with light blue gloves, slippers and ribbons
context_page_description: Edmund Evans was an English wood-engraver and colour printer during the Victorian era. Evans specialized in full-colour printing, which, in part because of his work, became popular in the mid-19th century. He employed and collaborated with illustrators such as Walter Crane, Randolph Caldecott, Kate Greenaway and Richard Doyle to produce what are now considered to be classic children's books. Although little is known about his life, he wrote a short autobiography before his death in 1905 in which he described his life as a printer in Victorian London.
  After finishing an apprenticeship, Evans went into business for himself. By the early 1850s, he had established a reputation as a printer of covers for a type of cheap novels known as yellow-backs. In the early 1860s, he began to print children's toy books and picture books in association with the printing house Routledge and Warne. His intention was to produce books for children that were beautiful and inexpensive. For three decades he produced multiple volumes each year, first illustrated by Crane, and later by Caldecott and Greenaway.
context_section_description: In the late 1870s, Kate Greenaway—who spent her earlier career illustrating greeting cards—persuaded her father, also in the engraving business, to show Evans her poetry manuscript, Under the Window. Evans invited her to Witley, and as he explains: "I was at once fascinated by the originality of the drawings and the ideas of the verse, so I at once purchased them." Evans believed her illustrations to be commercially appealing and encouraged Routledge to publish the book. Of Greenaway's first collection of illustrations and verse, Evans writes:
  After I had engraved the blocks and colour blocks, I printed the first edition of 20,000 copies, and was ridiculed by the publishers for risking such a large edition of a six-shilling book; but the edition sold before I could reprint another edition; in the meantime copies were sold at a premium. Reprinting kept on till 70,000 was reached.
  When George Eliot saw Greenaway's drawings, while visiting the Evanses at their home, she "was much charmed by them", however, she refused Evans' request to write a children's story to be illustrated by Greenaway. Published in 1879, Evans produced 100,000 copies of Under the Window (including French and German editions) which helped launch Greenaway's career as an author and illustrator of children's books. For Under the Window, Evans paid Greenaway outright for her artwork, and royalties up to one-third of proceeds, after the costs of printing; for subsequent books he paid half of the proceeds after deducting the printing costs. Evans photographed Greenaway's drawings to wood, engraved in facsimile, and created colour blocks of red, blue, yellow and flesh tint.
  Evans paid particular attention to detail in the printing of her Mother Goose. The "antique look" added to the Regency style artwork, while his ink and colouring choices conveyed the look of a hand-coloured book suitable for a mass-market edition. To achieve the antique look, rough paper was pressed and printed, with the roughness restored after printing by dipping the paper in water. As an example of 19th-century book production, Mother Goose is considered exceptional, and facsimiles were printed well into the mid-20th century.
  During the 1880s, Evans printed two to three Greenaway books a year, including a run of 150,000 copies of Kate Greenaway's Birthday Book (1880), as well as Mother Goose (1881), The Language of Flowers (1884), Marigold Garden (1885), The Pied Piper of Hamelin (1887), and King Pepito (1889). From the mid-1880s to the mid-1890s Evans printed, and Greenaway illustrated, nine almanacs—one each year. Greenaway benefitted from her association with Evans. As the leading publisher of children's books, Routledge provided Greenaway with a commercial base she may not have achieved without Evans' influence. Children's literature scholar Anne Lundin claims the distinctive quality of Evans' printing, as wells as his popularity as a children's book printer, linked Greenaway's name with his, thereby increasing her commercial appeal. Greenaway often visited the Evans family, played with their three daughters and continued to visit Evans after his move to Ventnor. During her career as an illustrator, Greenaway used Evans as sole engraver and printer.
caption: "Susan Blue" by Kate Greenaway (1885), engraved and printed by Evans. The girl's hat is a solid yellow against the green background created by colouring with blue and yellow.
exif: {}