This month's post is a few days late but with good reason: we've been shipping out the Series 1 and Series 2 copies of Labour Vertue Glorie. Then I was taking photos of Claudia Cohen's beautiful bindings, which I saw for myself the first time (in person) just this week. All of these copies were subscribed before publication, with most of them going to HM's established booksellers. So, we don't have any copies, but there should still be some available from the booksellers (links at right).
The Series 1 and 2 copies were bound in quarter vellum, with Karli Frigge's marbled papers over boards. The books were sewn on five vellum slips, which were then laced through the joints.Claudia relinquished the last of her stock of Karli's beautiful papers, so every copy is unique in the edition (four of them shown below).
By advance order, Series 1 copies could be extra-bound, although we hadn't settled on a clear plan for what the binding would be when we took the orders. I wanted something that included some of the elements of the quarter-bound copies, and we settled on a three-piece structure with a vellum spine and boards covered in black leather, tooled in gilt and blind. These copies (of which there were seven, numbers 1 - 7) included a second Wither emblem leaf, opposite the colophon.
The Series 1 copies also included a leaf from the preliminaries of Wither's emblem book, as a frontis. The image above is my own copy, so naturally I got the coolest leaf, the portrait of Wither by John Payne.
The Series 1 copies were distinguished by matching the two Crispin Van de Passe engravings on the Wither leaf, with the same plates from the Rollenhagen book (for which the engravings were originally commissioned). This allows for comparison of the two images printed at different times, in different places, on different papers, and presented in very different ways.
Again, being the printer, I had the pick of the litter, so my copy includes a conjugate leaf from Rollenhagen, with the duplicate image having been printed upside down!
So the long-promised Wither leaf book is finally & fully finished. We're into the fiddly details of the Kelmscott/Doves leaf book, which is going to be alarmingly large to accommodate the Bible leaf. More to follow...
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