{Ed. Note: I often go to the George Macy Imagery website for pictures and information on various Limited Editions Club and Heritage Press titles. I asked the site’s administrator, Jerry Fieldsted, to tell us a bit about himself. I encourage you to visit his site.}

Greetings! I’m Jerry Fieldsted, aka Wildcat (other nicknames include WildcatJF and Wildcat-Lvl), and I am the administrator of the website known as George Macy Imagery (aka the Limited Editions Club and Heritage Press Imagery). I also am the admin of a gaming (with bits of books, anime and music) blog called LVLs. (hence the Wildcat-Lvl alias). Before I get into why I’m into LEC and Heritage books, I’ll mention some of my other hobbies and passions. Video games are right up there, as well as drawing, writing (creatively and critically), reading (need to do more!), photography, listening to music and collecting old books and various video game merchandise. I am happily married to an amazing woman that I can not imagine life without, and am about to embark on an anthropology B.A. next year. I currently am employed at a local museum as its cataloger, which basically means I log the museum’s artifacts, archives and photos into a computer program after detailing it out by hand. I also work one to two days a week at a used book store, my third such employment in the world of books (had to be laid off twice from other shops, alas), where I am in charge of the classics section.

Now we can dig into my passion for these lovely books. I discovered the Heritage Press quite by accident. I was perusing a library book sale when I stumbled upon an amazing copy of The Aeneid, with the dynamic binding of Carlotta Petrina’s artwork. I was floored, and I was even more stunned at the $10 price tag – surely a book of this quality cost more! I bought it and was very pleased with myself, as I’ve been a fan of old books and believed I had a gem in my hands. The next time the same library had a sale, I discovered a brilliant copy of Sherlock Holmes, which, despite a garish handwritten name on the inside, was just beautiful. I was lucky enough to walk away with that one for a paltry $2! It happened to have a Sandglass, but for some reason I didn’t take much note of it. I was just pleased to continue building up my book collection. A nearby library also has sales, and at one particular visit, not too far off from picking up Sherlock, I found a third book that was stunning – the Pierre Brissaud illustrated Cyrano de Bergerac. Now I adore this play as it is, due to having been in a production of it (as De Guiche), and I was tickled to own such an exquisite copy of it. However, something clicked inside of me when I noticed that the publisher was the Heritage Press. That seemed familiar. Upon returning home I checked my Aeneid and Sherlock and, lo and behold, they were all from the same house! That’s when I became a Heritage collector.

Becoming a LEC collector took a little longer. I’m not exactly sure how I put 2 + 2 together and realized that the Heritage Press was more-or-less a mass-market version of the Limited Editions Club (LEC), but I found out about the LEC in 2008 when on my honeymoon in Monterey! It was at a book shop in Monterey that I was able to lay my eyes on a wide array of LEC titles. I spent at least a good hour pouring through them all, ultimately deciding on George Bernard Shaw’s Man and Superman. I’ve been back to that shop many times and continue to build my collection from LEC and Heritage Press from their excellent stock. I hope you don’t mind me keeping it a secret! Since these revelations, I’ve been ardent in purchasing books – I’ve currently acquired 16 LEC’s and around 70 Heritage Press titles, and the sky’s the limit!

My favorite LEC’s are:

The Innocent Voyage by Richard Hughes with color lithographs by Lynd Ward
Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky with woodcuts by Fritz Eichenberg
Tartuffe by Moliere with drawings by Hugo Steiner-Prag
Far from the Madding Crowd by Thomas Hardy with woodcuts by Agnes Miller Parker
Man and Superman by George Bernard Shaw with paintings and drawings by Charles Mozley
Zadig by Voltaire with decorations and colored drawings by Sylvain Sauvage

My favorite Heritage Press titles are:

The Story of Manon Lescaut by the Abbe Provost D’Exiles with watercolors by Pierre Brissaud (signed edition)
Salome by Oscar Wilde and decorated by Valenti Angelo
Beowulf by Anonymous with lithographs by Lynd Ward
Droll Stories by Honore de Balzac with illustrations by Boris Artzybasheff
Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman with illustrations by Rockwell Kent
The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, translated by Edward Fitzgerald with miniatures by Arthur Szyk