24.12.18
Shhh/Peaceful
Drone like the sound of a swarm of bees, not drone like a male bee. Thanks to all who have been supportive & interested in HM this past year. Happy merry.
30.11.18
Calligraphy, Printing & Books
To end the Year of Wither, an update on the Kelmscott & Doves leaf book project, followed by some seasonal gift suggestions for the bibliophile in your life. Bibliophiles, if you’re lucky. If you don’t have one, much less several, feel free to purchase any of the items in this month’s post & have them shipped to HM….
Last month I spent a few hours on a rainy Sunday sorting the Kelmscott Golden Legend and Doves Bible leaves to be included in the next book. Looking at an unbound or broken book is different than flipping through a bound copy: some aspects of the printing and setting stand out in ways they wouldn’t otherwise. For example, the Kelmscott printing isn’t actually that great - the inking is inconsistent, tending toward too much. The Bible is much more consistent in its printing, but one thing that struck me is Cobden-Sanderson’s type doesn’t really suit a book the size of his Bible (large quarto). In the essay by Pollard included in the new book, he comments on the type’s readability: “…I must confess to being unable to read more than twenty or thirty pages in the Doves Press type without feeling perceptibly chilled.” The Bible pages are dense, the lines are long, and the text is already somewhat impenetrable. The type is perfect for the octavo format employed for most Doves books, but on a Bible page I started noticing qualities of the majuscules that looked odd. The H in particular sticks out, like a sort taken from the wrong type case.
The batch of Bible leaves I found were from volume I, infamous for the unspecified “paper flaw” that resulted in so many of those copies looking like they’d been dipped in tea. Luckily none of the leaves being used for this leaf book are afflicted: they’re all lovely examples of the Doves watermarked handmade paper.
Printing of the book was finished in mid-November. The 20 copies that will have all of Martin Jackson’s calligraphy actually written in are with him now. He did the colophon for the entire edition first, so I can get to work on the 30 (printed) copies that will be cased here while he’s working on the calligraphy. The image above shows (top) a sheet with the initial letter printed with (below) one added by Martin, both of them editioned by him. Claudia and I are still discussing design ideas for the copies (with Martin’s calligraphy) that she’ll bind. A printed copy of the book, along with one page of Martin’s original calligraphy (probably the title page) will be on display with Vamp & Tramp at Codex, next February. With luck Claudia could have her copies completed by March, so we’re on track for an early 2019 issue.
Pollard’s essay in the new HM book starts with a brief discussion of why neither the Kelmscott nor Doves presses could be considered private. For many people the term “private press” has come to be synonymous with “fine press,” which gets me to my point: How is it that some people include the Folio Society in discussions of fine press publishers? For the past 100 years pedants have been tying themselves into all kinds of pretzels while crafting criteria that suit their agendas for what it & is not a fine or private press, but none of them could be looped & twisted enough to include the Folio Society. It’s a book club that issues hardcovers made with slightly better-than-average paper and cases, on par with Heritage or Easton! (And what’s the difference between Easton and Franklin Mint? The books look the same.) There’s nothing wrong with that, but don’t pretend it’s more than it is (I don’t believe the FS itself has every made claims to being a “fine press”). If you want a well-printed Shakespeare, check out the Nonesuch seven-volume set issued in 1929. Understated elegance in design and production, the books are a joy to hold and read. The Strand seems to have two sets on offer right now…
Will Rueter, over at The Aliquando Press, has just finished a new book that nicely overlaps with HM’s own current production: A Visit With William Morris is a “reconstructed interview taken from essays printed in the Pall Mall Gazette of 1891, the Daily Chronicle of 1893, the English Illustrated Magazine of 1895, and Bookselling of 1895.”
The edition of 40 copies (41 pp, approximately 12mo in size) was set in Jim Rimmer’s Nephi Medieval and Tell Text 5 (a copy of the Chaucer type), printed throughout in colour - the title page in seven colors. The four signatures are sewn on tapes and laced into a limp “saddle back” binding, covered in chiyogami paper, with a paper slipcase. An exuberant example of The Aliquando Press’s distinctive style in every way, and a bargain at C$150. To order contact Will directly (dovecotte@cogeco.ca).
That’s one for Morris, now one for C-S: John Howell for Books had this beauty on offer at the Seattle book fair. Remarkably it remains available…
COBDEN-SANDERSON, Thomas James (1840-1922). The Book Beautiful. [San Francisco: Printed by John J. Johnck, Lawton R Kennedy, Samuel T. Farquhar for the Roxburghe Club, 1930. 8vo. 7 3/4 x 5 1/2 inches. 14 pp. Beautifully printed on vellum; text clean, unmarked. Bound in full gilt-stamped vellum; binding square and tight, light soiling and tanning to the covers, rear paste-down coming up on the fore-edge. With the bookplate of Carl I. Wheat on the front paste-down. Very Good.
LIMITED EDITION, this is copy number 6 of 85 copies, being 1 of 10 printed on vellum. This volume was prepared as a keepsake for the October 29th 1930 dinner honoring William Edwin Rudge and George W. Jones held at the Fairmont Hotel. T. J. Cobden-Sanderson’s text regarding the elements that go into creating an ideal book was an inspiration to many American fine printers in the first half of the twentieth century. It received many treatments over the years, but few can rival this lovely setting printed on vellum. Samuel Farquhar’s copy, Number 1, on vellum, is at the Clark Library in Los Angeles. PROVENANCE: Carl Irving Wheat (1892-1966) was a California lawyer and historian and a historical cartographer of the American West. Wheat was a member of San Francisco’s Bohemian Club and participated in the resurrection of E Clampus Vitus. It was Henry R. Wagner who introduced Wheat to California history. Wheat moved to Los Angeles in 1893; it was in Los Angeles that Wheat issued most of his work on California history and the cartography of the American West, including Mapping the Transmississippi West, 1540-1861, which appeared in 5 volumes between 1957 and 1963.
John has lots of cool books, and this one is a STEAL at $1,500. I seriously considered stealing it myself, but I’m saving up for the new 2019 all-black Vespa. If you have one Vespa, you may as well have two…
I stumbled across a recent (2016) publication of a HP Lovecraft short story, by an American press I wasn’t familiar with, Amy Borezo’s Shelter Bookworks. So many of the people who publish (and purchase) Lovecraft default to the lurid aesthetic of EC Comics circa 1955. Borezo demonstrates the writer offers the potential for more subtle and abstract interpretation. Based on her site’s description and images, this looks like a well-produced and engaging book. My only quibble is typographic: I don’t like the line spaces between paragraphs, especially for fiction. But overall the book, and especially its binding, looks lovely. This mention is, however, a bit of a tease, as no copies seem to be available. I think the issue price was $350, which seems like a bargain for this book. Lux Mentis had a copy listed at $500 as recently as a month ago, but it’s gone now. Keep your eyes peeled (but not in the lurid, EC sense)..
Here’s an early Christmas present to myself (because who’s going to even know I want it?): Antoine Renouard’s history of the books published by Aldus and his sons. This is the second edition of 1825, which added some wonderful facsimile plates of types and manuscripts in the third volume. Of particular interest with this set is a note added to the front flyleaf of volume two, stating the set was “hand bound by John H. Nash for Mr. W.R.K. Young.”
According to the transcript of an oral history with Oscar Lewis (a great read, BTW), Young was an executive with the C&H Sugar Company in the 1920s (and probably before then), and an early president of the Book Club of California. He seems to have been an active collector and bibliophile, based on the material included in the Online Archive of California. He was married to Belle McMurtry, who Lewis describes as a “very able bookbinder,” which makes one wonder why she didn’t bind this set; maybe they predate her binding work. So Young and Nash were in the same orbit, which lends some credence to this set’s claim. Plus I bought it from a San Francisco bookseller. It’s interesting to me because I have not previously seen any mention of Nash doing any binding work. The books are providing some helpful material for next year’s Francesco Griffo project…
Last year this blog posted some Desert Island all-time top-ten album lists from fellow printers and publishers. Because printing and music go hand-in-hand, this year I’ll simply list a few people who were new & notable on the HM playlist in 2018. Thanks to all the regular visitors of this blog - there’s some interesting project news planned for early next year, so keep checking in. Pax fucus…
Sarah Davachi
Jannick Schou
Olan Mill
Listening Mirror
Kwajbasket
2.11.18
Some Truths About Publishing
“It is probably true that anyone who could make money at book publishing could make more in other business…it is possible that the better work you do [at publishing], the less monetary reward you will receive.” Yeah.
“…the one time practise of throwing in the Canadian market with the American rights is unjustified. The rule is for the Canadian market to be retained by the publisher in the country of origin.” Damn straight!
“It is one thing to produce a book, quite another to sell it, though some authors one meets regard the two as synonymous.” Some publishers too, but they tend to disappear after a book or two.
I managed to get down to the annual Seattle Antiquarian Book Fair this weekend. For once it wasn’t held on the Thanksgiving weekend, which is never a time one wants to have to cross the border. The absence of two long-time regulars - Michael R. Thompson and Louis Collins - was felt by everyone, but not morosely so. Saw lots of cool books. Eastons Books, of Mt Vernon, had a number of books from the estate of a Washington-state binder named Derek Lowe. Many were books about binding that he had rebound in quarter or full leather; some were books he’d purchased in sheets and bound. I got John Ryder’s Intimate Leaves from a Designer’s Notebook (Gregynog, 1993) in a lovely leather binding with inlay to the front board. I’ve only dipped into the book so far (one problem with books bound like this is you can’t just leave them lying on the floor by the bed…); Ryder may be a little pedantic and humorless for my taste, but we’ll see.
Speaking of nice bindings, here’s a surprise that came my way recently: a copy of Gill’s Hamlet, printed by him for the Limited Editions Club (1933), rebound by Claudia Cohen. For years she’d been sitting on three copies (mine + 2 more) in busted bindings, and I’d long ago given up pestering her to bind one up for me, so when she said she had a surprise for me this was the last thing on my radar. Subsequent to acquiring my busted copy, I came to learn about, and grapple with, Gill’s complete failure as a human. I didn't have to grapple much: he was, and should be remembered (if at all) primarily as an evil narcissist. I confess to finding Perpetua a masterpiece that cannot be denied, and that his book Typography contains many opinions that resonate and inspire. His art, compared to what else was going on during his lifetime, never particularly interested me. But I admire this Hamlet for its production, and Claudia's binding is much more elegant than the original. Told you I’d find something to set me off for this month’s post!
One of the aforementioned library duds I tried reading this past month defeated me on purely typographic grounds: its 400+ pages were set in Optima, very generously leaded. I could not get past the second page. I like Optima very much, but the combination of the face, the leading, and the content (magic realism, to use the easiest label) proved unbearable. It wasn’t ugly, just not conducive to extended reading.
AND ANOTHER THING!
Work on the Kelmscott & Doves leaf book proceeds on schedule. Not much more to be said about it right now.
7.10.18
More Writing Please
I started printing the new book last week; that, & a lack of anything worthwhile to report or rage against left me with little time or interest for posting. As I knew it would be, this project is a bit of a logistical hassle due to the sheets' large size (20 x 15"). They're so big that they make the Ostrander-Seymour Extra Heavy press look compact, which is an alarming thought.
Due to unexpectedly enthusiastic response to the plan for some of the 50 copies to have all of Martin Jackson's calligraphy actually written out by him, i.e. true calligraphic copies, with the agreement of all involved (including those who'd placed orders), the number has been increased from 12 to 20. Above is shown the sheet with the title page. The ones at left will go to Martin, when all printing is completed, and he will add his parts (in red). The ones at right are for the "Printed" copies, which will be cased at HM.
It takes three days to work off a sheet - one for each side in black, then a third for the addition of red to both sides - so we're more or less on schedule.
Unrelated: encountered a printing term I'd never heard before - chalcography, as in "a chalgographic frontispiece" (above). As far as I can tell, the process is synonymous with intaglio, so I don't understand if the term implies some difference.
I'll try to have something more interesting than just a progress report next month. With luck I'll encounter something book-related that will set me off...
16.9.18
Garage Sale (con't)
Just added a few new items to the ongoing HM garage sale/fundraiser. Proceeds will go toward acquisition of a few choice reference books I want for the Francesco Griffo project. Check out the work-up on the (near fine) jacket of Oriental Assembly!
3.9.18
Michael R. Thompson Was Cool
I was slow to hear the sad news that the great Los Angeles bookseller Michael R. Thompson passed away in August. Michael was a valued supporter of HM (it was through him that our books first got into the University of Toronto’s Thomas Fisher Library), and a source of advice on more than one occasion. He also provided a number of the high-spots on my bookshelves: the three-volume Grabhorn bibliography, the Laguna Verde bibliography, and the copy of William Andrews Clark’s Kelmscott and Doves press collections from which the text for HM’s next book was set are just a few of the titles. He loved helping collectors acquire coveted items, but he hated when I sold one book to buy another - he felt it diminished the long-term process and goal of building a personal collection.
Much of my early education in books, collecting, printing and publishing came from booksellers, either directly or through their catalogues. When I started HM, I knew the handful of booksellers who specialized in fine press books, and I judged my progress by if and when HM books got into their catalogues. Michael was one of those booksellers, and it was tremendously satisfying when, around 2005, our work caught his attention. Michael’s business will continue, under the direction of his long-time associate Carol Sandburg, who has also been a tireless promoter of HM. We look forward to the continued connection, and the memories of Michael it will always stir. There’s a good tribute to Michael by Bruce McKinney here, with links to a few other memorials.
AND ANOTHER THING!
Details of the next book have been finalized and it will hit the press this month. The Kelmscott & Doves Presses, an essay by Alfred Pollard with leaves from The Golden Legend (1892) and the English Bible (Vol. 1, 1903) will be set in Centaur and feature original calligraphy on the title page, the essay’s opening, page numbers and initial letters throughout by Martin Jackson. It will be printed in two colors (the calligraphy in red) with the handpress on dampened Arches wove (160 g) paper. Each of the leaves will be presented in its own opening, hinged and sewn to the gathering to allow for easy turning. It will be a large book (10 x 15 inches, 30 pp.) to accommodate the Bible leaf. The edition of 50 copies (plus 5 H/C) will be issued in two states: copies 1-12 will form the “Written” issue, with all of the calligraphy in each copy scribed by Martin. These copies will include the best leaves available, and be bound by Claudia Cohen, in a handmade-paper binding tooled in gilt, with a box. Copies 13-50 (the “Printed” issue) will reproduce his calligraphy from polymer plates, and be cased at HM in decorated paper over boards. The issue price for the Printed issue will be $750. We anticipate having copies ready to ship in January, 2019 (followed a few months later by the Written copies).
2.9.18
3.8.18
Everything's Gone Green
Got a company vehicle. Could do deliveries now. Won't. Vespas are one of the greatest designs ever.
Can't spend all my time riding. Contrary to the normal schedule for this blog, there may be a couple of brief post-scripts during August. FYI.
The paper for HM’s next project has been on order for the past few months, with no guarantee it would materialize anytime soon. Yesterday I received notice that it has shipped, and so I can broadcast details of the project. As previously mentioned, it will be another leaf book, this time featuring pages from the Kelmscott Press’s Golden Legend (1894) and the Doves Press’s English Bible (vol. I, 1901), with an essay about the two presses written by the English bibliophile Edward Pollard.
Pollard’s essay was written for the catalogue of William Andrews Clark Jr.’s collection, published in 1921 by John Henry Nash. Rather than a straight historical account of the two presses, Pollard offers a meditation on their influences and influence, particularly in matters of design and typography. He also makes specific, & reverential, mention of Edward Johnston’s opening calligraphy for the Doves Press’s edition of Paradise Lost, which sparked in me the idea to recruit Canadian calligrapher Martin Jackson for the project. Martin and his wife emigrated from England in 1968, and he established a career and reputation as a versatile and creative calligrapher. He has helped on a few HM projects (most recently editioning copies of Aurora Teardrops), and I have been looking for a project that would more expansively feature his work. Luckily the Pollard essay, and my ideas for how to incorporate Martin, appealed to him. During May and June we had several meetings to discuss design ideas and options, which for me were like a master class in visual structures, layout and letterforms.
The page for the new book is very large (10 x 15 inches) to accommodate the Doves leaf (about 9 x 13.25 inches). Martin’s calligraphy – printed in red, from polymer plates – will be featured on the title page, the essay’s opening, at least one initial letter in each spread, and the page numbers. He will also edition (number) the books. After trials with a few different types, we settled on Centaur, which may seem a cliché or safe choice, but really was the face that best suited the text, and complimented (rather than clashed with) the calligraphy and the types on the Kelmscott and Doves leaves. The choice of paper was affected by a special consideration: I knew I wanted some small portion of the edition to have the calligraphy actually done by Martin, rather than printed, so the paper had to be suitable for his pens. Arches text (the 120 g weight) has become my preferred commercial paper, and Martin is happy to work on the Arches wove sheets in any weight, but I was concerned that the book’s large page required a heavier sheet. I often find the 200 g feels too heavy – too rigid – for books, and was happy to discover that Arches makes a 160 g weight. Then everything ground to a halt when I was told it was on back-order.
Printing will start in September. The book runs to just 30 pages, plus the leaves, and each sheet will go through the press four times, so six to eight weeks of printing. Per the number of Golden Legend leaves available, the edition will be 50 copies (1 – 50), plus five hors de commerce (I – V). In the edition’s first 12 copies (& three H/C) Martin will add all of the calligraphic parts by hand, and sign the colophon. We are calling these the “Written” issue. They will be specially bound by Claudia Cohen in handmade paper over boards, embellished with gold tooling, and housed in a box. The “Printed” issue (copies 13 – 50) will be cased at HM with decorated paper over boards. Copies of the Printed issue will ship early in 2019. The Written copies will be issued in the spring.
2.7.18
Augustine Mathewes, Printer (& Rascal)
The device included on the title page of Labour Vertue Glorie was adapted/appropriated from Mathewes’ own, as it appears on the title pages in A Collection’s four books (i.e. parts). The references included here have been renumbered from what they are in the book, just for simplicity.
AUGUSTINE MATHEWES took his freedom as a Stationer in 1615. The first book he entered to the Register, in 1619, was Thomas Decker’s O per se O, or the belman of London. By 1620 he was working in partnership with John White, who had inherited the printing house of his father, William. In 1624 Mathewes assumed control (“farmes his printing house of John White”) in exchange for an annuity.[1] Mathewes’ name made regular appearances in the Register for the next two decades, sometimes for printing unlicensed works (not an entirely unusual occurrence at the time).
Notable books that Mathewes printed include Lady Mary Wroath’s The Countesse of Mountgomeries Urania (1621), which featured a frontis engraved by Crispin de Passe’s son, Simon, and is considered the first published prose romance written by an English woman; an edition of The Troublesome Raigne of John, King of England (1622) with a title page that mis-attributes it to William Shakespeare; and the second quarto of Othello (1630). Mathewes also published two editions of William Haughton’s comedic play Englishmen for My Money, one in 1626 for John Norton (whose name appears as printer on the title page), and the second in 1631 for himself.[2] The original license lay with William White, and must have come to Mathewes when he assumed the business (and its licenses) from son John.
William White had printed George Wither’s fourth book, The Shepherds Hunting, in 1615; it may have been through his association with White that Wither met Mathewes. The printer’s first recorded work with Wither was in 1622, when he printed Cantica Sacra, the publication that prefaced Wither’s protracted patent dispute with the Stationers’ Company.
Things seem to have started going badly for Mathewes in 1636. In the Registers of the Stationers’ Company is a record of Sir John Lambe, who was then investigating London’s printing industry, referring to Mathewes as a “pauper,” followed by the ambiguous statement “(let them agree who shall be, they have now 3: presses:).” The same record states that Marmaduke Parsons “hath kept matthews printing house.”[3]
In 1637 a Star Chamber decree tightening controls on access to presses and printing of all kinds was passed, in part a response to Puritans’ challenges to the Church of England. One of the most notorious Puritan pamphlets inciting the decree was The Holy Table, written and published anonymously by John Williams, bishop of Lincoln. “Williams in essence challenged the policy of calling the holy table an altar and of insisting that parish communion tables must be placed altarwise, at the end of chancels…The revised Short-Title Catalogue lists seven separate editions of this work, all dated 1637, but none of them provide information about stationers in the imprint.”[4] One of the stationers was Mathewes, who was caught printing the tract.
A record in the Stationers’ Register dated July of that year includes a letter written by John Lambe, the Dean of the Arches, addressed to himself. He states that “the forbidden book which must forever be associated with this Decree was The Holy Table,” and lists those “worthy to be authorized printers under the increasing durance to which the Press was now to be subjected.” The letter includes a brief statement about Mathewes: “he was taken reprinting of ye Holy Table. Marmaduke Parsons hath long had his presse and priu[v]ledg[e] made over to him and is most fitt to be in his Roome.”[5] Mathewes was out and Parsons was in.
States Papers Domestic for July, 1637 includes two entries mentioning Mathewes. The first summarizes Lambe’s letter of printers “worthy to be authorized.” The second summarizes Mathewes’ plea for clemency to the commissioners overseeing the printers of London, for his transgression with The Holy Table: “Understanding he has committed a great error, he prays the commissioners to be a means with Archbishop Laud that he may be admitted as a master printer.”[6]
His plea was unsuccessful, and Mathewes seems to have been made an example for the new decree: his name disappears from the Stationers’ Register for the next fifteen years. In 1653 he entered a copy of William Johnson’s book Vocabula Chimica, then oblivion.
1. Arber, E., ed. A Transcript of the Registers of the Company of Stationers of London, 1554-1640 A.D. vol 3. Privately printed, 1876. 700
2. Baugh, A. C. Introduction to Wm. Haughton’s Englishmen For My Money, or A Woman Will Have Her Will. Privately printed, 1917. 92
3. Arber. Registers of the Company of Stationers, vol 3. 704
4. Towers, S. M. Control of Religious Printing in Early Stuart England. Boydell Press, 2003. 241
5. Arber. Registers of the Company of Stationers, vol. 4. 1877. 528
6. Bruce, J., ed. Calendar of State Papers, Domestic Series, of the Reign of Charles I, 1637. Longmans, Green, Reader, & Dyer, 1868. 344
Here's a P.S. found after publication of LVG...
6.6.18
Got No News, Here Are Some Pictures of Books
Labour Vertue Glorie has enjoyed some attention & kind words over the past month, but enough coasting, time to start the next one. I'll have more complete details by next month, but for now here is what I can commit to:
That's a quarto sheet from The Golden Legend (Kelmscott Press, 1892). The sheet measures approx. 16 x 22.5 inches, which folds down to a page approximately 8 x 11 inches.
That's a quarto sheet from the English Bible, vol. I (Doves Press, 1902). The sheet measures approx. 18.25 x 26.5 inches, which folds down to a page approx. 9 x 13 inches.
In both sheets, if you look hard & imagine, you can see the two registration-pin holes along the vertical fold (i.e. separating the opposing heads to create the top margin), roughly aligned with the outer edges of the text blocks. That's how you print with a handpress and ensure consistent registration (especially with dampened paper).
HM's next book is tentatively titled simply The Kelmscott & Doves Presses, and will reprint an article on those topics by Alfred Pollard (see above), accompanied by a leaf from the Kelmscott Golden Legend and the Doves English Bible. It will be a large book (10 x 15 inches, printed in folios), to accommodate the Bible leaf. The paper will be Arches, printed damp. Unless we scrap everything & start all over, the text will be set in Centaur, with a calligraphic title page, opening, and initial letters throughout. The calligraphy will be done by Martin Jackson, and we're currently at work finalizing how it will look and integrate with the typeset material.
HM has previously recruited Martin for a few small projects - most notably The Mouse & The Lizard and the special copies of El Autotubus Azul (2nd ed.) - and I've been wanting to undertake a proper collaboration with him for years, one that fully incorporates and displays his talents, and this will be the project.
The edition will be 50 copies, plus five HC. The book is scheduled to be printed in September and October. Each sheet will have a second color on both sides, which means three consecutive days of printing per sheet. Because the sheets will be bigger than my preferred maximum size to date (13 x 18 inches, the size of Reg Lissel's foolscap sheets), I must acquire a complete new set of boards for damping and drying, and at least one more book press large enough to accommodate them. A few copies might leak out in time for Christmas, but I'll put 2019 on the title page.
Pollard's essay is primarily typographic in focus, and he had (and admits to) a preference for the Kelmscott books and types. Nash's original printing doesn't rank with his best work - Pollard's essay is set in italic Caslon (the dreaded Caslon...), sometimes in lines with almost no word spacing - but whaddaya want for a catalogue. It's an excellent bibliographic reference for the two presses. I found my copy with the kind help & indulgence of Carol Sandburg and Michael R. Thompson.
AND ANOTHER THING!
I don't have anything else interesting to report or axes to grind, so I'll pad the rest of this month's post with images of things from the HM shelves that might be of interest...
When I acquired the Golden Legend leaves, a few years ago, I knew I'd be stumped for how to use them, given that Neil Shaver had already done an excellent & beautifully-produced leaf book on the subject (printed damp on Batchelor & Son laid paper c.1940; Neil was the last printer in North America I can think of who regularly dampened his paper for printing). Why there are so many loose leaves from the Golden Legend floating around I don't know. The fact that it's a three-volume tome probably has something to do with it. But I was even more potentially snookered than I'd realized: I'd forgotten that, tucked beside my copy of Neil's book, was a pamphlet printed by Grabhorn-Hoyem for a Roxburghe dinner in 1966, with a Golden Legend leaf! It also reprints an extract from Chapter Six of Thorstein Veblen's 1899 essay "The Theory of the Leisure Class" in which he expresses a dim view, from economic and sociological perspectives, of the kind of books Morris produced. The pamphlet consists of four sheets (16 pp) of English handmade wove paper. Beautiful initial letter (engraved, I'm guessing). Edition of 116 copies, self-wraps, quarto, 16 pp.
I plan on publishing an illustrated, expanded & larger-format second edition of my Francesco Griffo bibliography-in-quotations, possibly as soon as next year. I've started poking around for sources I couldn't get or didn't know about when I did the first edition. This is one little item that's cropped up (& is one of the sources responsible for Griffo's work being credited to the wrong person for some time).
Found this on the shelves of Serendipity Books during one of Peter Howard's famous pre-ILAB fair pig roasts, the year of the first Codex fair (2007?). Lazy pressman was being a bit cavalier when putting the paper in the press, but a cool book nonetheless. I love even the most commercial of French printing right up to the mid-20th century, and I miss Peter & Serendipity.
Let's end with a bouquet, Printer's Flowers - Whimsicalities from The Windsor Press (1933, 150 copies). Quite small (24mo?), charming patterned paper over boards, a lively typographic frolic. Exactly the kind of book I don't have the talent, mind or patience to create.
4.5.18
Labour Vertue Glorie
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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