Barry Moser is a big bear of a man with a full white beard and the Tennessee accent of a Bible Belt preacher (which at age 19, is what he was). He is also an extraordinary bookman, one of the world’s great book designers and illustrators. Added to that, he is a virtuoso wood engraver, a painter, a designer, a publisher, an author, and a frequent lecturer on the art of the book.

    Moser was born in Chattanooga, Tennessee, in 1940. He put himself through his last two years of college as a Methodist preacher, but his calling to the ministry didn’t last. He was accepted into the Theological Seminary at Vanderbilt, but he declined to attend. He moved to New England and devoted himself to teaching and to learning for himself the crafts of etching and wood engraving. He later studied printing and typography at the Gehenna Press under the tutelage of Harold McGrath and Leonard Baskin.

Since 1969, when he composed his first line of hand-set type, Moser has illustrated some of this century’s most beautiful private press books.World renowned for his  children's illustrations, wood engravings, watercolors, and reinterpretations of the classics, including the Pennyroyal Press editions of Alice in Wonderland, Through the Looking Glass, Frankenstein, Huckleberry Finn, The Wizard of Oz, and the Pennyroyal Caxton Edition of the Holy Bible, Barry Moser’s art is represented in numerous library and museum collections.  His work has been published in more than two hundred books for children and adults.

    Moser, who lives in western Massachusetts, has recently turned to the challenge of a lifetime, what has been described as the typographer’s and illustrator’s Everest. Barry Moser has taken on The Holy Bible, the first illustrator to do so, solo, since Gustave Dore in 1865. Moser’s magnum opus, THE PENNYROYAL CAXTON BIBLE. was published and exhibited in October 1999 at R. Michelson Galleries, the premiere source of his wood engravings, watercolors, and fine art books since 1982.