More than a decade ago, I saw a craiglslist posting for about 170 sheets of Barcham Green Hayle paper offered at the low low price of C$2 per. Apparently the seller was clearing out her dead father’s basement, or something like that. Not believing my luck in being the first to contact the seller, the sheets went into the storage locker where most of my paper is stashed, waiting for the right project to come along.
The tricky part of buying stacks of vintage or odd-lot paper like this is, you need a project that will use most of what you have, and have dimensions that suit whatever the sheet folds down to (e.g. folio, quarto, etc). There’s no point in using just a portion, then having to wait for another project that will accommodate the remainder. Otherwise you’re just wasting the paper.
(The 2021 reprinting of Francesco Griffo’s foreword to his 1501 Petrarch is an example of a project conceived simply to make good use of a small stash of paper: Years ago I inherited about a dozen sheets of Richard de Bas. Lovely paper, but what do you do with a dozen sheets? I finally decided to think of something before it got lost or damaged.)
For most HM projects, the one factor that’s essentially set from the beginning is the edition size: 50 is a typical maximum, and fewer copies is OK too. I’ve gotten a little better at printing over the years, and can now feel reasonably confident I’ll end up with 50 good sheets from a run if I print 65 (for a long time I’d print 75, because I was a crap printer). So, if my edition is going to be 50, I need enough paper to print at least 65 copies of each sheet.
It was not my initial intention to use the Hayle for Dunwich. It was only after I’d been playing with design and format options for a while that I realized it would fit the page proportions I had settled on perfectly. And I had enough sheets to make 56 copies (the edition’s 50 numbered copies and the contributors’ six H.C. copies), with about 20 sheets left over to cover disasters. Almost: with the way I had the text run out, I was short one leaf (two pages), either the first (title page and ©) or last (story’s ending and colophon). I probably could have revised the setting to cram the text enough to free up two pages, but that wouldn’t be satisfactory. My solution was to print the title page on a leaf of different Barcham Green paper, Penhurst. It’s about the same weight as the Hayle, but a cream hue. I’ve always liked books that mix different papers, and I liked the way the title page stands out this way.
Then another problem popped up: somewhere along the way, the number of sheets listed on the wrapper of my Hayle stash and the actual number decohered: I actually had only enough to make 52 copies. That meant (1) no mistakes, and (2) four of the 56 copies had to be on some other paper.
Hmmm.
I was already planning on using my old standby, Guarro laid, for the necessary initial sheets printed while fine-tuning the inking and makeready, so I could just add a few more sheets and make the four needed copies from Guarro.
While pondering all this, I found in the paper vault a slim package with another English handmade, F. J. Head. It was about the same weight as the Hayle, but a cream hue, and just slightly smaller in one dimension. I had enough to print just three copies of Dunwich. That’s why in the end, 48 of the numbered copies and four of the H.C. are printed on Hayle; two of the numbered and one H.C. on F.J. Head, and one H.C. on Guarro. (If I’d had any disasters during printing, the number of copies on Guarro would have gone up.) The colophons of copies not printed on Hayle note which paper was used. From the exterior, the only way to tell is the FJH copies are about 1/8" narrower.
So that’s a few downstream issues to be aware of if you start hording odd packages of old paper for use one day...
DUNWICH DETAILS
I’ll update dunwich.ca this month with photos of Briony’s prints and the completed book. We remain on track to issue copies in November. Meanwhile, the bookseller Jacob Quinlan will have a copy (ARC/NFS) on display at the Thomas Fisher Press Fair on September 7th. If you’re in Toronto, drop by. Jacob always has cool stuff.
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