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.
Posts
