"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?

JUBILATE AGNO by Christopher Smart

Last evening, Frances and I gave a talk to a friendly and enthusiastic group at the Monnow Valley Art Centre which was mentioned by Frances two posts back. The subject of the event was the relationship between ourselves, the books we produce and the artists we work with.

We also planned to describe our latest project in the context of the talk and we were thrilled when it proved possible for the first bound copy of the book, sent by the binders, to reach us (just a couple of hours) before we left home for the Monnow Valley. Great drama in the unveiling, then, and general approval all round, I am happy to say.

This project is a major one for us and has been one of the central activities in our lives for a long time now, although we are aware that we have not revealed anything about it during the many months we have been labouring. Even now we can only offer a partial unveiling as the Main Edition slipcase and the solander box for the Special Edition have yet to be completed and we will also have to remain coy about the prices for the two editions . . . for we still do not know some final costs.

For me, anyway, the book is a tribute to the day when I was given the mighty pleasure of being able to study (closely and intimately) the great copy of the Gutenberg Bible in the library of Eton College. On our way home I decided that I wanted to make a book which, apart from many other reasons for bringing it about, was clearly a tribute to the wonderful Bible I had been allowed to examine.







After much thought, we decided that Christopher Smart's  strange, wonderful and life-enhancing text entitled Jubilate Agno would be a fitting subject and the challenge to work the great mass of words into an editorially disciplined form (and to enable the artist, Angela Lemaire, who enthusiastically chose to accompany us on this great trek, to be able to express her own approach to a much-loved text) was appropriately daunting!

 


We will of course post more about this exciting book when the binding has been completed and the prices fixed.

Angela's images are all printed direct from her wood- and linocut blocks and all the colour you see in these photographs is the printed colour to be found in all copies of the Main Edition.

Please note, though, that (as with earlier ventures) Angela has added much hand-colouring to the pages of the ten copies of the Special Edition, for which a drop-back box is also being created. On previous occasions, these copies have been snapped up almost immediately so do contact us to make a reservation, subject of course to hearing what the price has to be!

Ashdown Gallery Show

As an update to our previous post urging people - at least those living in the South-East of England - to go to see the show at the Ashdown Gallery in Forest Row, we were sent these images of the opening night where copies of The Swimmer were flying off the shelf.  Great stuff.  The photos on the walls, and indeed within the book, are by Steffi Pusch and the story writer, S J Butler, read from the book and we can include a short clip of that . . .

We still have copies of the book if the gallery sells out - they only had two left this morning.

Looking ahead

 After a quiet summer September arrives and activity is all around us . . .

 One of the most beautiful galleries opened its doors and its magnificent garden to book and print lovers who found their way through the delights of the Herefordshire countryside to Monnow Valley Arts Centre (previously in London the same people ran the Wolseley Gallery). Overlooking the Black Mountain at the top of which Eric Gill lived at Capel y fin, the garden has sculptures and unusual garden furniture, fountains . . . but we were all there to see their new show of prints and books collected by Julian Francis. 

 
His passion has been for wood engravings by artists such as Gertrude Hermes, Agnes Miller Parker, John Buckland Wright and he then moved towards some of the books that such people illustrated in the middle of the twentieth century.  It is a fascinating exposition of how a collector becomes hooked and explores the work of an artist thereby gaining an understanding of the imagination and the craft employed in working with wood in this way.  The interesting collection is elegantly displayed but is not for sale.  Alongside the main gallery space is a studio space in which the walls are hung with framed prints which are for sale by many of the same artists whose books appear in Julian Francis’ collection.  There is also a table of Old Stile Press books to draw attention to our forthcoming talk on Friday 12 October about the collaboration between artist and printer in the creation of our books.
for details about this see the gallery website www.monnowvalleyarts.org

For those in the South East of England, rather than in the glories of the Welsh borders, there is an opportunity to see a show of photographs by Steffi Pusch who collaborated with Sarah Butler on our recently published book The Swimmer.





The book will be on display from 13 September - 3 October at the Ashdown Gallery in Forest Row, East Sussex and can be read and bought at the show - together with some of Steffi’s highly original photographs. Steffi printed all of the photographs in the book herself and then they were tipped into the text.






Details of the gallery and how to get there are on their website (www.ashdowngallery.co.uk) and we do hope that many will go and see the book and photographs there.  For all sorts of reasons we shall not be at the various autumn book fairs which we have been at for many years - particularly Whitechapel in East London and Oak Knoll Fest in the USA - we shall have to rely on people exploring our website to discover the many exciting books which we  display there.

How to grow your own pressmark . . .

 

 

Have you got the hedge for it?

The Beauty in the Random

 

 When I showed these photographs to Frances, she said they looked like shots of outer space taken by some amazingly powerful radio telescope and waxed lyrical about on television by Professor Brian Cox!

 

 Those of my dear readers who have been around our Press and this Blog for a time will know that I am for ever being mesmerized by 'found' pictures in the world around me. I have captured these in rocks, in sea/sand and sundry others.

These were even more strange and evanescant than usual. All I need say is that I had a job yesterday (in the furtherance of the current printing project) which involved cutting a black-painted board into quarters. Involved in the task were a saw, some oil, a boot (on my foot) used as a vice, resultant sawdust and some water dripped from plants as I was working outside - as it had stopped raining for a miraculous minute.!

It was as I was picked the resultant four boards up from the ground (and a split second before I had wiped their surfaces clean) that I realized what incredibly beautiful visions I had been shown. So I went for my camera and . . .

 

. . . then cleaned them off in preparation for the day's printing!

. . . 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.