David Esslemont

David Esslemont is an award-winning British artist, designer, printer, bookbinder, and publisher now living in America. Born in Newcastle upon Tyne, England in 1953, Esslemont studied Fine Art (painting) at the Central School of Art and Design in London (now The University of the Arts). Among his tutors were Blair Hughes-Stanton and Cecil Collins. After leaving college he established his own press in Newcastle, where he printed, bound and published a number of books with wood engravings, including several with engravings by the eighteenth-century wood engraver Thomas Bewick and his contemporaries. From 1985 to 1997 Esslemont was Controller (managing and artistic director) of the Gregynog Press in Wales. At Gregynog he designed and printed several prize-winning books including Giraldus Cambrensis for which he won the Felice Feliciano Award for Book Design in 1991.

He now lives in rural northeast Iowa and continues to make books and prints, lately on food related themes such as chili, curry and pizza.