Water Baby!

It is usual, I think, for the latest whatever-it-is to be thought of as the most beautiful and in every way the most outstanding of all . . . whether we are talking of babies or books made by hand!

Each of the books I have been involved in has had its moment in the sun BUT I have to say that the latest, Ralph Kiggell's The Third Thing, just brought back by Frances from the binders, is really something rather special. Rejoicing at its completion is, for me, partly a reflection of the extraordinary amount of time I spent printing and over-printing yet again each of these pages. As the weeks went by with a daily printing, I became ever more relieved (on behalf of anyone who might think to purchase a copy) that we have never costed a single minute of the time I spend on any of the many activities involved in producing them into the price of our books. Crazy I know . . . but I just love doing it.





There are many people who were entranced by Ralph's earlier masterpiece Leading the Cranes Home (now completely sold out) who have been looking forward for some time to this new venture. The subject matter and choice of texts in this book are quite different from the former but the format and arrangement of the two books are exactly the same. Here again each spread is given up to the printing of a poem or piece of prose (this time on the subject of Water in all its different manifestations) together with one of Ralph's stunning multi-coloured woodcuts in the Japanese manner.

I have posted a few of these spreads here earlier but now a full description of the book and a (generous!) slideshow can be found on our website.




Also described is the Special Edition and glimpses given of the prints Ralph has made specially for this purpose and quite separate from the book. There are only ten of these Specials and I have to say that more than half the copies have already been spoken for after an email to interested parties sent yesterday. If you would like to get your hands on one of the remaining copies I would urge considerable speed!

Books on show this month

Last month Angela Lemaire had a show of her books, prints and paintings in Edinburgh and now forthcoming in London and Eastbourne are two more shows which will include books from The Old Stile Press.

Josie Reed will be known to many who visited her Gallery in Bath where she had several very successful shows of books.  Now, as Reed Contemporary Books she has curated a show at Flow in London of artists' books.  Previously we have mentioned Flow because there have been exhibitions of contemporary Designed Bookbindings held there - but this show focuses on the whole book - not just its binding! Josie has selected Jubilate Agno among her fifty beautiful books.




































The second show - in Eastbourne - is at the Emma Mason Gallery which concentrates on printmaking. This is an 80th birthday tribute to Garrick Palmer.  His book LAND will be among the exhibits which will consist largely of his miraculous wood engravings. Sadly there are no more copies of The Ballad of Reading Gaol which he did with us - though separate prints exist still.


"Garrick Palmer at Eighty"
A celebration of the work of wood engraver Garrick Palmer
19th September – 12th October 2013
At the Emma Mason Gallery, Eastbourne


  


emma mason
B R I T I S H  P R I N T S
3 Cornfield Terrace
Eastbourne
East Sussex
BN21 4NN

t   01323 727545
m 07944 535354

www.emmamason.co.uk
sales@emmamason.co.uk







We hope some of you may be able to get to these shows - the next Fair which we will be at ourselves is in Oxford at the beginning of November - more details when we know them.

a good time of it . . .

We had skillfully avoided all suggestions for a grand party and indeed mentioned the fact only to a few friends whom we happened to be contacting anyway. One of these was Natalie d'Arbeloff who rushed to wield her Photoshop over the photograph that appears on our website to produce this wonderful image!

So, it was our Golden Wedding Anniversary yesterday and we had a very good time of it.

We ate lots of delicious seafood and drank an appropriate amount of wine, sitting looking at our valley and listening to the wind in the aspen tree. We also went to a good garden centre in search of a clutch of golden trees and shrubs to make a special corner for our garden, to record the event . . . and to add to a brace of glorious Acers that had been sent by our daughter Cressida (and family) in Glasgow!

We also went down to the river and stood in the silence of our own Meeting for Worship . . . and thought of our fifty years together. We may not get 'the same again' but we look forward keenly to whatever comes in the future.

For some reason, as we stood there, some of the words of River Man by Nick Drake (cousin by marriage, I am proud to say) ran through my mind . . . 

Gonna see the river man
Gonna tell him all I can
About the plan
For lilac time

If he tells me all he knows
About the way his river flows
And all night shows
In summertime

Betty said she prayed today
For the sky to blow away
Or maybe stay
She wasn’t sure

Mighty teazel!

Ever since my Grandmother called me (a teenager) to see the miracle that had been wrought in her tiny garden in Winchester . . . a self-seeded teazel in all its glory . . . this plant has been one of my  absolute favourites.

This year the same miracle has happened to us. This plant grew up among the grasses and wild flowers on a bank. All but it have been scythed and now it stands alone in all its architectural and sculptural wonder!

As I was investigating a particular head with my camera's lens, the bumble bee just came into the shot and began to pose!

Edinburgh Festival dates with Angela Lemaire

 Two years ago McNaughtan's bookshop in Edinburgh showed some of Angela's work  in their gallery upstairs during the Festival and this year they have again given over their gallery to her work but especially to celebrate her new book with us - Jubilate Agno.  We hope there will be some reading this blog who may have the opportunity to visit and see more of Angela's work as a painter and printmaker.  The book itself is described in detail on our website


McNaughtan's would be delighted to see you in their gallery and/or at the poetry readings. They have sent out a notice which gives the details of the event.

  Angela Lemaire: Alpha & Omega

An exhibition in celebration of the publication of Jubilate Agno by Christopher Smart (1722-1771), published by The Old Stile Press in 2012. On show will be some of the images made for this book by Angela Lemaire, as well as her other, related works and artist’s books. There will be woodcuts, linocuts, drawings, paintings and special books.
(All works for sale)

Private View: Monday 5th August 6-8pm

Poetry Readings

Angela Lemaire and Nicky Toneri will give readings from Christopher Smart's at McNaughtan's Bookshop on Wednesday 14th August at 2 p.m, 3 p.m and 4 p.m.

Exhibition continues until 31st August
Opening hours: Tuesday to Saturday 11.00 am to 5.00 pm

McNaughtan’s Bookshop, 3A & 4A Haddington Place, (Leith Walk), Edinburgh, EH7 4AE
Tel: 0131 556 5897 Email: mcnbooks@btconnect.com
Web: www.mcnaughtansbookshop.com

DO try this at home! . . .

 . . . if you have half a chance, and before the nannies start to twitter.

Surely, this is what childhood is all about!

 

Agility, coupled with a bit of brotherly co-operation,

leads to

satisfaction, and a

great bowl of cherries!

Black spots on a peacock's tail.

There are many logistical imperatives that determine the order in which these pages return to the press for another printing. The need to change the colour of the ink on the press as seldom as possible is one obvious one and the fact that the effect of green on grey can be very different from grey on green.

It is, therefore, the result of an entirely logical sequence (and yet totally unplanned) that yesterday saw me printing the final colour on the final image on the final side of the final sheet of this mightily laborious - but fabulous - book, The Third Thing . . . and that this last thing should be the finishing touch to one of the most beautiful images in the book . . . black spots on the peacock's tail . . . together with some 'drawing' on the legs and head and a cloud!

Below are the sheets before the black spots. This side of this sheet has been printed on four times already. To say nothing, of course, of the fact that the other side has also gone through the press four or five times as well.

Below that, we have Ralph Kiggell's wood block for the 'black' printing . . .

N.B. It will invite you to click to 'read more'. PLEASE DO THAT.
I did something by mistake and cannot reverse it. If anyone out there can help . . . HELP!

A Cool Printing for a Hot Day

 I can hardly believe it but I am really coming to the end of printing these images for Ralph Kiggell's The Third Thing.

My printing office is cruelly cold during the winter but deliciously cool in summer. Added to that I was printing the final, 'black' (actually a very dark green) block on this wonderful image - which happens to be very 'close to home'.

When Ralph was staying with us last year, we showed him the place where we had seen our own otters on the icefloes on Christmas day. He made some sketches and the next we knew was that he had placed this wonderful otter image at Catchmays Court.

Anyway, that is Frances and me up there at top left!

"Gone Fising"

Well, we did not do any fishing as such but we have eaten enough of the stuff! And wonderful it was too.

Frances and I decided a few weeks ago that we needed to get away for a few days (three nights to be exact) and one particular hotel seemed to jump out of the internet, so we booked it. The moment we mentioned to friends that we were going to Hope Cove in South Devon, many said that they had been there as children or for some other reason knew it well, but it was completely unknown to us. Now, I have to say, it is simply top of our list.

We left home reasonably early and ate up the motorway as far as Exeter. Thereafter we turned left so we could dawdle past some of the well-known features of The English Riviera. We started off with Dawlish where we had a sandwich and I took a lot of photographs, including the one at the head of this post!

We really liked this place. It was delightfully old-fashioned but exciting - with big trains running right along the beach and disappearing into five tunnels blasted through bright rusty-purple cliffs by friends of Isambard Kingdom Brunel.

We spent more time than we thought we should in that friendly place but it did not matter because one glance at Torquay and Paignton showed that we did not want to spend more time in either than was needed to find a way out.

That left Brixham. I have known about this place all my life but I don’t think I have actually been there before. My parents knew it well and a painting by Arthur Briscoe hung above the mantlepiece at home which I loved. It was of boats (of course, knowing my parents) and it was of Brixham Harbour but, as there was a thick fog (beautifully painted) I never gained any knowledge as to what the place looked like.

At first glance, Brixham seemed to have gone the way of everything else . . . with thousands of smart and expensive yachts in place of the few fog-bound old-timers of my youth. Then, in the distance, we suddenly saw a small brown mainsail at an angle and and a tiny foresail and slowly there came into sight exactly the sort of boat that I believe my parents owned when they were young. The boat’s name was Pobble and I have always had the romantic notion that I was conceived on board one day in late August 1936!

We eventually reached Hope Cove and our hotel and it immediately became clear that we had made a good decision! I will not give a blow by blow account of our stay, let alone of the wonderful food that we were given (too cruel!) but suffice it to say that everything went our way - especially the weather for we had loads of sun when most of the country had none. I will leave it to the inevitable photographs to tell the story or at least to give the atmosphere.

If you are the sort of person who likes holiday photographs to be straightforward shots of places and people you will, I fear, be frustrated by many of these but I have to say that I was rather pleased with a number of these, especially this one. It is amazing how many straight line and interesting containments of space are to be found at the seaside!

 

 

 

 

 

 

Finally, here is one of Frances, in Edith Sitwell mode. Any of our gentle readers who know what she had been putting up with during this last year, will be happy to know that she is in very good form and full of the joys of early summer.

More Water

I am certainly going to resist the temptation to post an image of every page of this book the moment it comes  off the press with the final printing in place but, with Ralph's simple but amazingly powerful image for the titlepage spread completed this morning, I simply couldn't resist!

In case anyone is perplexed about the title of this collection, I feel I should help by revealing a poem from later on in the book. It is by D.H. Lawrence and is not very long.

Water is H2O, hydrogen two parts, oxygen one,

but there is also a third thing, that makes it water

and nobody knows what that is.



While I was at school, I remember, I had to write a Prize Essay on the subject
"A scientist is a poet gone wrong". 
What a wonderful subject . . . I could not resist!

I made a lot out of a favourite poem by my great literary idol of the moment, Dylan Thomas (still very much alive in those distant days)  . . .

The force that through the green fuse drives the flower
Drives my green age;
That blasts the roots of trees is my destroyer.

Had I known about the Lawrence poem, I could have made a lot of that too!

Hibernation is at an end! (I promise.)

 Variations of this somewhat unpreposessing sight have been in front of my eyes day after day in my printing office over a period of many months. They have all been blocks cut by Ralph Kiggell in Bangkok for his second book with The Old Stile Press entitled The Third Thing. I started off with ones that printed grey and then moved through green on to blue. The results were satisfying, up to a point, as I managed to get the register correct and the image I was printing placed itself perfectly on the page in relation to the earlier colour which I might have printed a week or a month ago . . . but it was not until this morning that I added a (final) black printing to a two-page spread and had the great satisfaction of seeing a finished work!

This wonderful image is typical of Ralph's vision and ability to mould perspective to his whim and, indeed, I already know that this will be a very special book. The theme this time is 'Water' and the selection of poems and prose extracts is wide-ranging. Some are well-known and some are not. This fine poem by Nancy and Anna will, as it happens, be receiving its first publication in this book.

Despite the excitement of today, I have a number of weeks left of adding black printings and then going back to other colours where they have to be printed on top of the black in order to bring about the effects required by the artist. 

I am kept hard at it partly to enjoy the satisfaction that a successful printing brings me and partly because, remembering the eagerness with which copies of Ralph's earlier book, Leading the Cranes Home, was snatched up by collectors, I  know that this book also will be a very popular one.

I need hardly point out that this blog has been silent for many moons. I apologise to those who have in the past done me the honour of looking at my stuff. As the silent time grew longer, I thought, gloomily, that all would have fled and, even if I started again, nobody would  know!

The fact is that Frances' brother Hugo, a black-belt computer whiz, came to stay and up-graded Frances' skills in the way of Facebook . . . and convinced us that she could use the wonders of that to tell the world of this blog's resurrection. So . . . 

The use of the word hibernation in this heading is not just affectation. I have been seriously uncomfortable during the endless ice age and, only now, am I truly living again. The Spring is rushing to catch up and I have never heard so many ecstatic birds. I have trained myself to be awake for the Dawn Chorus each morning and revel in the halleluias of the many and, particularly, the sublime coluratura of the blackbird just outside our bedroom window.

After photographing the woodblock on my press, I took a few more examples of the surge of Spring. Is it just a reaction from all that snow in the eyes or are the dandelions even more glorious than usual this time?

This lady's smock has been blown about a bit but . . .  what a delicate construction.

And, as for these, what species of dragon's teeth were planted here to give rise to such a terrifyingly beautiful army?