. . . in praise of rain

Although I love and need the sun,

I have to admit to being really excited by wind and rain.

This image should be a movie

so that you could see the sheets of rain moire-ing up the valley

but at least you can get an idea of the tree's movement

and can see the small god passing up-river on his little cloud.

The tree is of course my favourite Aspen . . . planted it myself!

As always it is the very last to greet the Spring,

holding itself in skeletonic check for almost a month after the rest.
 Then . . . the grand entrance,

a burst of incredible growth (not that many days ago in point of fact) and then all is made up.

This is the time of year . . .

 . . .  when I am drawn to express my awe and ecstasy at the beauties yet again showered upon us by Nature - each year more wonderful than the last - and my joy that there are at least some who still feel that these gifts are the sufficient and perfect reward for all the labours and trials and sadnesses of our lives and that, even if there are many who are blind to them and seem bent on destroying these beauties in a mad scramble for money and power and self-love, nevertheless the next Spring will come round and offer the same munificence . . . so that our souls can be renewed and we can be sustained for another year.

I have these feelings of wonder and thankfulness every day of my life but the focus is even more profound today . . . the eve of the day that marks my having enjoyed this delicious life for three quarters of a century.

Nicolas

Come to the Fair!

 



The London International Antiquarian Book Fair may not sound like the obvious place to find contemporary books but in the National Hall at Olympia this year there is a room devoted to what is described as ALSO exhibitors - there you will find Old Stile Press books and other stands with artists books, fine bindings, tools and materials for binding and conservation . . . and a bar with real ale!  The main focus is, of course, on wonderfully rare books from the finest dealers both British and International and this year especially on the National Trust which cares for 140 libraries around the UK.

We hope that you might be able to visit the Fair and if you would like a complimentary ticket let me know and I will forward one to you.  I - that is Frances (it seems I confused people by writing here about my father and some readers thought it was Nicolas' father!) - look forward to seeing you.

We shall have on display our newest titles : The Swimmer

and earlier ones - for instance, in the 200th anniversary year of the Grimm brothers do you have a copy of Harry Brockway's Faithful John?

something nasty in the woodshed!

This is not, as you might think, one of the deeper dungeons in the Tower of London. It is our woodshed . . . the scene of one of the most important labours of our lives, keeping warm.

This morning I had the great pleasure of seeing and reading an exquisite photographic essay that Nancy Campbell has posted on her website on the subject of The Woodpiles of Denmark.

I immediately felt that I might grab my camera and see what I could offer by way of an alternative vision. In Denmark, the building of a woodpile is clearly a matter of civic pride or, at a personal level, the outward sign of some very tidy minds!


I have to say that things are not quite like that in this part of the Lower Wye Valley. An altogether less formal approach holds sway . . . as can be seen below.

We are, of course, very much at the end of the log-burning season at he moment and much of what can be seen here are logs that I have tried to split . . . and failed.

 . . . and the woodshed is almost empty.

What has to happen now is that we telephone a couple of burly and brilliant young men who come with their saws and a trailer and their boundless energy and set to translating trees around the place which have blown down during the year, shed branches, grown so big as to overcrowd and reduce light (and thereby have earned a squirt of red paint from my can) . . . into a full woodshed ready for the new year.


All I can now show you, therefore, is a selection of natural sculptures . . . or victims waiting for drawing and quartering.

 

 

 

 

Some recent roofing work has happily provided us with a generous stack of what we call 'easy-burn' wood

 

 

 Finally, and nothing to do with wood, is what I reckon to be one of the most arresting photographs of my career. I should, however, correct that to read 'my camera's career', for I have to admit that it was taken 'by mistake' as I stumbled over a small piece of wood to take a capture a larger (above)!

I did help it on a bit in Photoshop but I am thinking of letting the camera go out by itself from now on.

Green Man

 

 Anyone who makes a habit of visiting the Artlog of Clive Hicks-Jenkins (and who on earth does not) will know that the wizard of Ty Isaf has of late been giving lots of little green men a run for their money.

Walking across the garden this morning I noticed that the (greatly welcome) sun was hitting our own Green Man particularly happily so I went for the camera!

 

This lovely fountainhead was carved for us many years ago by Harry Brockway, around the time when he was working with us - making exquisite wood engravings for various books. We are blessed with the fact that our water supply is a spring on the hill behind us and what is not captured for drinking and every other home use forms a stream that goes through garden and field and on into the river Wye. While never having the time to 'do' things with it (as in the Villa d'Este) nor yet tried to subdue it into electricity, we do have a few pipes carrying it in all directions and the most successful use is the pond into which this Green Man spurts.

When Harry and we were discussing this small commission. my idea was a fountainhead who combined the character of a Green Man with that of the little pucker-lipped cherubs who are to be seen puffing winds in the corners of old maps. This latter aspect has been, for the moment anyway, somewhat obscured by his rather magnificent beard!

While I had my camera there I was happy also to record the peace of the lovely stone buddha that was left to me by my uncle and aunt who spent lives in the East.

One hundred years ago today

 It is difficult to imagine life a hundred years ago when my father, Sir Edward Pickering, was born on this day.  I don't possess any photographs of him then but the television has been filled with programmes about Titanic and the people aboard in 1912 and the lifestyle and dress put his birth into a context unbelievably different from our current times.  These two photos show him when he was around 25 (above) and then around 50 (below) as the somewhat anxious father of the bride. The time between these two involved the upheavals of World War Two during which he was parted from his family.  His marriage didn't survive but he continued to encourage and inspire me with a love of words and of music.


His life was totally devoted to journalism in one form or another and we constantly wonder what he would have made of recent years in newspapers.  He was at work in an advisory role right up to his death in 2003. His second family and I only met after his death but we can now have very happy occasions together with children, grandchildren and indeed his great-grandchildren and today we can all raise a glass to toast a hundred years since his birth.

a new book for 2012

This week we have reached that exciting point in the birth of a book when all its component parts are assembled and we can actually hold a bound copy in our hands.
A storyteller, a photographer and the designer/printer came together to create The Swimmer.






Sarah Butler - or as she prefers to be known as a writer, S.J. Butler - works as a freelance author, journalist and editor as well as ‘onion chopper, washer of socks and maker of tea’. A modest expression of her own talents. The Swimmer was published in The Warwick Review and then was selected for The Best British Short Stories 2011 published by Salt.



The photographer, Steffi Pusch, read the story and responded excitedly with images which employ both ancient and modern photographic techniques.


At this point, enter Nicolas who felt that the story’s sense of flow and the photographer’s images, which float as if in the water alongside the swimmer, could happily be brought together in a book where type has been chosen for slow contemplative reading and the cover design places the whole in the heart of nature.







The Swimmer tells the story of a writer working in her room overlooking a river during a long, hot summer. Overcoming her initial fear of the river with its power and strength to overwhelm a swimmer, she steps into the water and into an unexplored realm of emotion.
‘Words and pictures swim together’ in the cooling water past tree-lined banks, under a bridge and around curving bends . . . so much is concentrated into this depiction of a self-revelatory experience.





The photographs have been printed with archival pigment ink on high quality fine art paper by Steffi Pusch and are tipped on to the pages of the story. She has used a Holga and a pinhole camera, both medium format film cameras - chosen because they allow very little control and so ‘you need to work intuitively. I tend to feel, to sense the atmosphere of the image rather than to document something definite in front of my camera.’

Copies of the book should reach us fairly shortly and will be £145 plus p&p so do let us know if you would like to receive one by emailing frances@oldstilepress.com.

Old Stile Press Bibliographies reviewed:

We seem to have been focussing on other aspects of our lives of late and our blogs have been very erratic. One of our friends made a new year resolution to put something on his blog each day and has kept to it faithfully! We are not going that far in our promises but certainly we shall endeavour to write more frequently about what is happening at the Press and the Spring will surely spur Nicolas into taking photographs of life in the Wye Valley!

Just before we found ourselves surrounded by grandchildren in their Easter holiday from school the latest edition of Parenthesis arrived in our mail. The magazine is produced for the Fine Press Book Association members twice yearly, one edited in the UK and one in North America. It is a beautifully produced and designed magazine covering all aspects of printing, design and collecting of books with reviews of recent publications (www.fpba.com). National newspapers and magazines tend to ignore books such as we produce because of their limited numbers but sometimes it is good to be noticed and introduced to a wider world than we at present can reach.

I write about this because, in the current Parenthesis there is a review by Thorsten Sjörlin of our two bibliographies which gives a good idea of what the books have to offer.


"Reading the two volumes of The Old Stile Press bibliography (and this is a bibliography you read) and looking at the profusion of illustrations, you soon realise that his (Nicolas’) love (. . . of drawings made with black ink and, just as important, of the white space left in between) remains undiminished.

"Often one feels that a book is just a vehicle for illustrations, but look closer and you will find that everything is thought through very carefully: text, illustrations, design, size, the lot.

"As a resource for the avid collectors of books from the Press, they must be invaluable, and as an introduction for the uninitiated they must be regarded as excellent publicity.’

"The two volumes are an important contribution to the world of the private press, and we should be glad that Nicolas McDowall (with his collaborators) has undertaken such a thorough overview of the book production of the Old Stile Press."


It was good too that the reviewer was not previously familiar with our output and so came to the books with a fresh eye. Sometimes, and perhaps inevitably, reviewers are also collectors who come with a biased view of books they like and respond to, or other printers who look very technically at the books and not at their overall artistic impact.

Both books are still available: the earlier one is £40 and the second is £45 - we can send them together for £78 incl. p& p in the UK. Overseas postage is at cost.

Tewkesbury Tales . . . in photographs

Intrepid travellers most people know that we are not but we have just returned from a real, live HOLIDAY away from home! We spent all of two nights in a hotel of great antiquity and charm in Tewkesbury which is in one of the counties adjacent to ours and involved less than an hour's drive to get there, and that was avoiding motorways!

I do not intend to bore you with a blow-by-blow account of our doings but I thought some might be amused by a selection of the photographs in my usual quirky style that inevitably ensued. You can, I am sure, provide good captions for yourselves! They were all taken in the Abbey or the town itself except for a climb up the Malvern Hills.

They will of course click larger.

Snowdrops for Bangkok

Ralph Kiggell, the maker of magical woodcut prints in the Japanese style, lives in Bangkok and I am prepared to believe that Snowdrops are in rather short supply in Thailand. In a recent email, he asked whether ours had made an appearance yet. Detecting a note of '(original)home sickness', perhaps, I took a few photographs.

Above is the rather obvious 'woodland covering' picture but here is one I rather like . . . especially as Ralph quite often, in his prints, makes a feature of long shadows!






Here, for instance, is one long shadow on the title page of his exquisite book, Leading the Cranes Home. This is one of the most popular of our recent books and, I confess, I do have my favourites!





For many months now, emails have been flying between Thailand and Wales as plans for the 'sequel' (ie same format) developed. It was decided, when we last met, that the theme for the new book would be "Water" and Ralph has now (I think) completed his selection of poems and prose extracts and, a few days ago, an email arrived containing photographs of an exciting first harvest of newly cut blocks.





A book which is to contain such an exquisite woodblock print as this, needs watching, I feel.






Watch this space!