Some line blocks from designs by Berthold Wolpe

I spent most of yesterday afternoon in the company of Paul Nash, at his Strawberry Press which he operates at his home in Moreton-in-Marsh. We were proofing some old line blocks, zincos, which had belonged to the former Oxford University Printer Vivian Ridler. They are from the designs of his friend Berthold Wolpe and are mostly book illustrations and decorations. Some of the thirty blocks are badly corroded but only one was so bad as to make identification hard, and we were pleased to find that the majority would still yield acceptable impressions. It's unlikely that any of them were made after about 1950.
   Two of the blocks have marks indicating their origin and these point to two groups which are easy to identify by reference to A.S.Osley's catalogue Berthold Wolpe: A Retrospective Survey (V.& A.Museum and Faber, 1980). One group are illustrations for a cookery book produced just after the war, F. Le Mesurier's Sauces, French and English: Sixty-Five Classic and Traditional French and English Sauces (Faber, 1947, Osley 89), a prospect which must have been quite extraordinarily mouth-watering in 1947. Another group are among the twelve drawings Wolpe made to decorate the Collected Poems of Walter de la Mare, first published in 1942.
   One or two blocks may be even older, being (I think) head- and tail-pieces for Noel Denholm-Young, Magna Carta and other Charters of English Liberties printed in 1938 by Vivian Ridler under the imprint of Theodore Besterman's Guyon House Press. This was the first printed book to use Wolpe's Albertus type. It's very scarce, not least because over half the edition of 250 copies were destroyed in the Blitz.
   Only a few blocks are signed. One of these is about Penguin Books and must have been made for the Double Crown Club. But what's the date? Was it for a menu?

I think the drawings for Sauces, French and English are delightful. Here are three:

And Paul at his Vandercook: