About

Fred Holland Day was born in Norwood, Massachusetts, into a wealthy New England manufacturing family. An ardent bibliophile and especially an enthusiast of the English poet John Keats, whose memorabilia and first editions he avidly collected. He co-founded, with Herbert Copeland, the Boston publishing house of Copeland and Day, publishing handsomely produced volumes of contemporary literature (especially poetry) using pre-industrial printing techniques, and it also imported Oscar wilde’s Salome (illustrated by Aubrey Beardsley) and the controversial English literary journal The Yellow Book. Both Copeland and Day were associated with a group of poets and artists called the Boston Bohemians, who espoused the values of contemporary European aestheticism and decadence. Describing the group as ‘smugly cliquish, enamoured of the exotic and the bizarre, contemptuous of the normal or average, in costume, in behavior, and in art’, Stephen Maxfield Parrish wrote of Day, ‘His manner swings from an exaggerated reserve that masks an absence of worldly ease, to a flamboyance carefully accentuated by an opera cloak, a broad black hat, a long cigarette holder with a flat Russian cigarette in it, and a convincingly esthetic bearing.

Jan Bostoen, was born in Kortrijk, Belgium, has the made it his mission to carry the old values and traditions of the publishing house into the digital era. BCD private press has the ambition of bringing aesthetic to a broader audience by relying on more commercial materials and techniques, which lowered the overall cost of each book. by promoting the concept of the integrated book with artist-designed bindings and interior layout. The new interest in books as works of art wants to attract the burgeoning middle class consumer with disposable income. Beautiful books are desirable, both for viewing pleasure and as a status symbol. As such we are at the forefront of this significant alteration in commercial book design and marketing.