The Girl from the Sea by George Mackay Brown

That particular and exciting moment has come round again - the day when the first complete copy of a new book arrives from the binder. Has it worked? Are the pages in the correct order? Do all the colours, carefully compared from swatches of cloth and papers, harmonize as we hoped they would? Does the book 'sing'?

I am happy that, on this occasion, the answers to these questions are very positive, so I am very pleased to share some photographs which will give an idea of what the book looks like while the rest of the edition is being bound.





Eighteen years ago we celebrated the seventieth birthday of George Mackay Brown by publishing In the Margins of a Shakespeare. This lovely book has long been out of print (as is our first venture with George, Keepers of the House) - but we are now able, with the enthusiastic help of his literary executors, to undertake a third venture. This is a ‘play for voices’ written in 1984 and, we think, given a single performance then, before going back, metaphorically (and probably literally!), into the drawer in the poet's kitchen table where it remained, unpublished, until after his death.






There are many stories and legends of selkies - the seals that surround the shores of Orkney - their deep brown eyes that captivate humans, their singing that mesmerises. George Mackay Brown had written stories of them.







Quite separately, we had met an American artist, Michael Onken, and had learned that he came regularly to Scotland to draw and paint. He had developed a passion for the writing of GMB and . . . for selkies, which he drew while on Orkney. In a 'long shot' bid to link two disparate strands, we asked the literary executors if by any chance there might be any unpublished writing about selkies. You will be able to sense our disbelieving delight when the typescript was offered to us for The Girl from the Sea.






It is a simply told but very moving play involving a young man, his elderly parents and the arrival of a beautiful girl in their midst . . .







Michael Onken has indulged his love of representing the antics of seals in the water, extending over several page openings at the start and end of the book but has also cut wood and lino to tell the actual story with imagery which captures the isolation of a croft on Orkney.








For each of the 10 copies of the Special edition, Michael Onken has included an original watercolour which is included, within a portfolio, together with signed proofs of four of the prints from within the book. (For more about Michael Onken and these watercolours, scroll down to 22 October 2008.)







In a much treasured letter sent to us when George Mackay Brown was still alive, he wrote:
‘Go on for a long time making beautiful books’. Here, many years after his death, we hope we have carried out his wish!







330 x 230mm. 56pp. The paper is Vélin Arches. 27 images printed directly from wood engraved, woodcut and lino cut blocks. Type is Albertina. The binding is by The Fine Book Bindery, Wellingborough.

Main edition: 195 copies.

Special edition: 10 copies with a portfolio of prints and an original watercolour. Numbered I-X

All are numbered and signed by the artist.

ISBN-13: 978-0-907664-82-6





The book will be on show for the first time at this Fair in an exciting new venue in London.

"Hope"- for 20th January 2009

How powerful is this short word, and how deeply important to all of us, especially at this time in world history.

This was a New Year gift, sent to us by our friends in New York, Russell Maret and Annie Schlecter who we know spent much time and energy electioneering. They have stayed with us here briefly but were egregiously kind to Frances last year, when she ended up in New York after a Bookfair.

I particularly wanted to show off this treasure here because that is exactly what I think it is. I am not sure exactly how Russell 'did it' and I really don't need to know. I simply think it is one of the most exquisitely beautiful pieces of letterpress printing that I have ever seen. View it as large as you can.



This morning has been sunny and quite warm so my brain has come alive again! I walked around the domain with my camera on the look out for my own take on the theme of "Hope".
This is what I found and this is what we offer.

Frosty

The margins and sheltered backwaters of our river are frozen. This is one of the manmade piers (called cribs in this part of the world) made for fishermen to operate from, which are visible at low tide as here.

The country is afflicted at the moment by very cold winds from the north and frost and frozen water have been with us, morning and night, for many days. I am blissfully happy at the end of the day when we can snuggle under a large duvet but, to be honest, for the rest of the time, my brain freezes as solid as my body and any amount of thermal attire can hardly keep me functioning from one cup of coffee to the next . . . and that is without having had a very painful tooth removed yesterday!

Heigh Ho!

If rather miserable, go for a walk . . . with the camera!





That one is quite pleasing but the photograph below is pretty boring, I hear you say. Yes, but fascinating to me. The grass does not LOOK very frosted but is, in fact, hard and crunchy, like wedding icing. I suddenly realized that I was looking at deer slots quite clearly made and preserved and that there was a great number (indeed pretty well a fieldful) of them. We know that the deer do always come down from the hill behind us to the river but only seldom do we see them. Clearly, if I were a better Boy Scout than I ever could have been (even had I joined ), I might have been to answer the crucial question. In the moonlight of last night (with me firmly under the duvet), were there scores of roe deer leaving all those elegant footprints or was it just a few who spent the night running up and down and round in circles?

Here they some, anyway, down by the riverside.





Just when I was concentrating on something else, I heard one of my (and most everyone else's, I reckon) favourite sounds . . . the beating of swans' wings. I was at the riverside, at least, but had no time for anything other than to press the button and hope. By the time these two lovely creatures had disappeared round the bend of the river, I had taken four shots. Two proved to be complete failures but I am happy that (with some careful cropping) I got these two beauties. 50% is not too bad!

Great Christmas Present!

William Morris is famous for having said . . .

Have nothing in your house [or garden!] that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful.




I feel that he would heartily approve of this, as both beautiful and useful . . . a customized wheelbarrow, given to us at this festive season by our son Dan.

He has customized cars for himself over many years but this venture relates to the time when our ride-on mower was removed from here by local ruffians and the police discovered it on top of a local hill - on view, as it were, as a 'lot' in a somewhat bizarre rural auction. We got it back unharmed and Dan had the brilliant idea of painting it all over in strange and wonderful colours so that its ownership would never again be open to doubt and a thief would have as much difficulty in disposing of it as if he had nicked the Mona Lisa!

So, we now have this fine work of art which will also do a fine (and secure) day's labour in the garden.

Thanks Dan!

Appropriate Greetings . . .

. . . from a suitably frosty Wye Valley . . .

. . . and from old "Bah, Humbug!" himself . . .

and from Frances,
unusually in the place where Nicolas is traditionally hidden,
behind the camera!

Some excellent photographs and a crazed printer (digital!)

Earlier on we mentioned the fact that House and Garden wanted to do an article about us (in a series about people who do things or make things) and that we had been interviewed and photographed. The article was duly published (in the December issue, so it should still be in the shops) and we have heard from a nice lot of people who are new to all this and were interested to look on our website and choose stuff to buy. We also heard from a lot of already friends who had somehow seen the article and were spurred to say hello!

The photographer, Andrew Montgomery, had kindly said that, after the publication of the article, he would send us a disc of the photos saying that, with a few entirely understandable exceptions, we could do whatever we liked with them. Here, therefore, are the three main ones which we are very pleased to have.

I must however give one very strong caveat. If anyone out there starts to look not at the figures but at the 'things' lying around and whatever is happening on the press &c in order to learn how things are done at the OSP, please let them not waste their time!!

Andrew is a wonderful photographer but not much of a printer . . . more like a set designer in some costume drama for a film. When he saw clothes pegs hanging from the roof he wanted something hanging from them. Old discarded proofs from an earlier book looked colourful even though there is no circumstance under which they would be hung up like that! I will not continue but would simply say that almost nothing is as it should be. The image of me peering at a sheet that appears to be coming off the press looks really great BUT, I have never before been at that end of the press in my life and no printed paper would emerge from that end of the press and so on and so on . . . but, again, they are really lovely photographs and we thank him profoundly.







Now here's a funny thing . . .

I remember, as a boy, being fascinated when I was shown, in the National Gallery, the painting entitled The Ambassadors, and received an explanation of the curious object in front of the two gentlemen. On subsequent visits, I remember purposely going to the side of the painting and squinting at what, from there, was clearly a skull in elongated form. I cannot remember the theories as to why it had been included like that by the artist but I certainly enjoyed it when my knowing little act had the effect of causing others, young or old, to sidle round to see for themselves!






Why do I mention this now with a reproduction of the painting? Simply that, after inserting Andrew's disc in my computer, I sought to print out one of the photographs. All seemed to be going to plan until I started to see what was emerging from the printer . . .

I am not really interested in why or how this happened except that either computer or printer had clearly had some sort of seizure. I am however very intrigued to see my own head [I am not quite sure how easy it is to view a computer from the side but it is easier if you click the image bigger] appearing in exactly the same way as the skull in Mr Holbein's painting!

Kouros

I decided to photograph this a few days ago - because the light suddenly struck me as good - but it has been standing under a cherry tree in our garden, giving pleasure to all, for a decade at least.

Frankly I have seen damaged sculptures of kouroi in the The British Museum and The Louvre with much less presence than this and I could kid you with tales of expensive dealers in illegal exports and/or digs at dead of night or even of famous British sculptors with a 'thing' about 5th century Athens . . .

. . . but I will come clean! We two were enjoying a rare holiday, all that time ago - in the Yorkshire Moors. I cannot recall exactly where but I remember we were told that from there, on a good day, you could see the sea off the east coast of England and the west at the same time. [Could that really be? Were we being taken for a bit of a ride?]

Anyway, we were quite high up and found ourselves on a hillside which was literally strewn (like bodies on a terrible battlefield that went on as far as the eye could see) with pieces of limestone pavement, presumably littered there by some glacier or another. [OK, so I am NOT a geologist!]

This was a remarkable enough sight but my eye was suddenly caught by one single piece of this rock. It was not particularly close but was propped up slightly by the fact that it lay on another so that the all-important line of its 'neck' was visible. I went to it, stood it upright and walked back. At that moment it HAD to come home with us.

Two points to make. Firstly, I had brought home pieces of rock from holidays practically all my life. Great hunks of serpentine from Cornwall, a large but beautifully broken 'pebble' from a beach in Ireland and various treasures from France, Greece etc.

The second point, and I hasten to make it, is that all this was before there were laws in this land designed to stop beautiful natural landscapes being denuded by insensitives with great lorries ripping up stone for sale in garden centres for suburbia's water-features. Yes, I put my hands up to thieving this piece from the nation but we did only take the one piece and I am sure that it has given more pleasure to our visitors here, quite apart from ourselves, than it would have given if it had lain all these years, anonymous among its millions of fellows!

We found a base (from our own land!) and pinned the one to the other and placed it under the cherry tree. Since then, I have been continually amazed at how satisfying a piece of sculpture it is. It is my experience that most pieces of 'found sculpture' may look wonderful from one angle but, from most others, just look like a hunks of rock. This one looks spectacularly good from pretty well all angles.

Anyway, that is enough of me going on about it. I will simply give a random sequence of the photographs I took the other day and I hope they will please and interest. It may be, of course, that you see the thing just as a random hunk of rock . . .

It's that time of year again!

. . . when Christmas Cards have to be produced!

Our first thought is whether there is anything suitable in the book that is 'on the press' or in preparation at the moment. [The Benjamin Britten A Christmas Sequence was so long in coming that it served for TWO Christmases!]

Thus it was logical to think in terms of Clive Hicks-Jenkins who has long been making studies towards a definitive style for our edition of Peter Shaffer's play EQUUS. These heads may or may not appear in the book as the style continues to develop. The images in the book, however, certainly won't have blue backgrounds!

This was my idea and (as I said to Clive in an email giving him a courtesy preview!) 'I enjoyed painting 400 unique little abstracts - just in the correct place on a large sheet. I reckoned it was fascinating how each of the heads changes character minutely depending on the background'.

Clive happily approved of what I had done and added "I like the way the brush strokes give a feeling of wind and movement in keeping with the mane-blown subject. And the colour too is perfect, turning the beast into a creature of the high air, as in Pegasus, as well perhaps as of watery depths, as personified by the Scottish Kelpie!"



Here, then are three cards, more or less at random. You can make up your own mind whether the horses change character or mood!

Lindsay Kemp

Liebestod in Pembrokeshire

I've been playing around again . . . at what is becoming one of my favourite forms of relaxation, setting a video of some aspect of the natural world against one of my favourite pieces of music. Although I have chopped it around a bit for the purpose of this film, the 'raw material' started life as a single take of about 29 minutes, which was a bit tiring but remarkable to do.

I am aware that I am 'borrowing' this music without permission so, if I offend copyright in so doing, please let me know and I will take it down.

This actual recording, in the form of a little 45 rpm disc, was known by certain of my friends at University as Nicolas's Catharsis Music! It was used often, sometimes more than once a day, when student angst was upon me and it often did me much good. I think that the water would have helped!

[I put up this post some weeks ago but lowered it when I found the video totally unsatisfactory. It is better this time and that is all due, yet again, to patient help from Natalie d'Arbeloff.]

If you are interested in this little movie, you can play it, bigger and better, here.

Faces in the Trees

After what seems like weeks of grey, overcast and characterless weather, yesterday produced bright sun for a few hours. We had sorted ourselves out a little earlier than necessary to drive to Swansea so I thought I would rush for the camera to catch some Autumn colours.

After a bit of time, I became fascinated with just one tree. Yes, the colours were great . . . but I soon concentrated on photographing 'found faces'. I am interested to know whether everyone who looks at any of these images first (or only) sees part of a tree OR whether all or most first sees the 'face' that I have seen and 'drawn out' of the natural elements.

Anyway, I hope you enjoy these as much as I have!


for Iulia, in Romania, whose Autumn colour photographs I have heard about and look forward to seeing.























































. . . and that is the paper-bark maple tree where all these faces live! And, of course, I was only operating at the lowest 6 feet of the tree.

The sculpture, by the way is by Harry Brockway. Put his name into the 'search blog' box above to see his books with the OSP and other sculpture around the place!



Finally, putting aside the faces, here is one I rather like . . .