Eric Gill was not primarily a writer, and he certainly never thought of himself as a man of letters. He was, as he says in the epitaph he prepared for his own tombstone, a stone carver. He made his living carving inscriptions and bas-reliefs, and he achieved both fame and success as an engraver, sculptor, and typographic designer. But Gill was also a thinker, and after his conversion to Catholicism was completed in 1913, he began to reflect with an ever-increasing intensity on the social and economic conditions that affect the production of art in the modern world and the relationship between those conditions and the teachings of the Catholic faith. As a result of his reflections, Gill produced a series of essays and lectures, mainly in the 1920s and 1930s, which constitute a powerful critique of modern culture in the tradition of John Ruskin and William Morris. Among...