Piper writes of Devizes with great fondness, celebrating "its good minor architecture, magnificent museum (contents, not building), brewery and tobacco factory (sensible, small-scale manufactures for such a town), branch-line railway, good inns and bars, hotels that are not over Trust-worthy, fair churches and chapels, canal of handsome appearance, sensible plan, bracing air, good-looking inhabitants, cinemas (old-fashioned and super, the super not ostentatious). Disadvantages: lack of second-hand bookshops, absence of sylvan walks, and the wind. It's hard to think of any others."
"And so, taking coffee and a bun over the baker and confectioner's, next door but two to W. H. Smith & Son's, while the east wind blows across the Market Place, one looks out of the window on to a rarity: an English town that has not been spoiled and has not been preserved artificially."
The lithographs were printed by Butler and Tanner on what Orde Levinson, author of the catalog raisonné of Piper's prints, calls "standard quality machine-made lithographic cartridge paper". They were printed back to back, so one can display either Devizes: The Market Place or the other two, but not all at once. Piper must have been particularly pleased with the four panel, two page Devizes: The Market Place, because he reworked it at a larger size and with much brighter color for the double-page frontispiece and title page for his book Buildings and Prospects in 1948.
I apologize to my readers for such a long gap between posts; circumstances mean that I have little time to devote to this blog at the moment, so although I have many new posts planned, their appearance will be sporadic.