THE OLD SCHOOL PRESS

A listing of all our in-print and planned books

For details of our out-of-print titles, click on the 'O/P' button at left.

Washi memories

Photographs of the Anzai family of papermakers and others at work, with samples of their papers, with a commentary by Eleanor Burkett

This new title from the Press will provide an important record of a bygone era of Japanese papermaking in the Fukushima province of Japan, in particular the work of one family, the Anzais.

The book will be introduced by paper and textile artist Eleanor Burkett, and will have a foreword by renowned paper historian, Sidney E. Berger. The text will be based on conversations that Eleanor has had, past and present, with papermakers from the village of Kamikawasaki in Fukushima province, an area with a thousand-year history of papermaking now on the brink of extinction.

Thirty atmospheric black-and-white photographs recording the Anzai family and others at work in the 1950s will each be accompanied by a commentary detailing the processes used. Each group of photographs will be preceded by a heading in Japanese script printed from original calligraphy by Yoko Hashimoto. Samples of a dozen papers that were once made in the area will be included in each copy; they include pure kozo papers, dyed papers (pink and indigo of various shades), walnut-dyed crushed papers, and papers with petals.

The text will be set by hand in 14pt Monotype Fournier italic, with ancillary matter in Stempel Optima, and printed on Matrix Fine Laid. The photographs will be printed digitally and tipped in. The quarter-cloth binding will have end-papers of Abbey Mill laid, with a commissioned suminagashi paper by Sarah Amatt on the boards. The page size will be 300 mm by 215 mm, and the book runs to 118 pages.

There will be 150 copies of which about 135 will be for sale. Price to be determined but perhaps around £190. If you would like to know when copies are available and you have not already let us know please register your interest. Please note that these details might change - we are still in the planning stage!

Into the lagoon

The islands and towns of the Venetian lagoon in 1914 with images by Leslie Gerry

Another book on a favourite topic: Venice and its environs, in particular the surrounding lagoon, a subject that rarely gets the coverage that the city itself is all too readily given.

For the text we've chosen excerpts from an early twentieth-century writer's work, that of E. V. Lucas, writing just at the outbreak of the First World War when things were probably less visitor friendly in some respects than they are today. Some things change, others remain as ever. Everyone in Burano is dirty. The Murano glass works is a tourist trap: 'the entrance may be 'free', but the exit rarely is so'. A pleasing connection is the visit to the printing house of the Armenian Mechitarists on the island of San Lazzaro, where the library can still be visited today.

This is our second collaboration with artist Leslie Gerry who has prepared eight fabulous and evocative images of the islands in the Venetian lagoon. (Our first was Stockholm reflections.)

Leslie has drawn and printed his images digitally of course, and printed them on 190gsm Bockingford paper from St Cuthberts Mill - this has been (uniquely) treated on both sides to be receptive to inkjet inks when printed on his 12-colour Surecolor P7500. The text - by contrast - has been set and printed in the superb Hunt Roman, with the 14pt for the main text. We chose a mid-grey ink to soften the text slightly, in harmony with some of the images.

The book makes forty pages and is bound in quarter red cloth with one of Leslie's images on the front and back boards, the whole then in a Japanese-style wrap. See above for a sequence of images of the binding, and a video of the interior.

There are fifty copies for sale at £290 each.

The lost colours of the Cyclades

A new study of colour in the Greek islands by John Sutcliffe

John Sutcliffe's The Colours of Rome, which we published in October 2013, was a great success and sold out quickly. So we were delighted to have the opportunity of working on another book by him on a similar colour-based theme.

In his capacity as a decorative artist, John has done a great deal of work in the Cyclades, in particular on the small island of Schinoussa. One of the outcomes of this has been a growing fascination with what happened to colour on the buildings of Greece and the islands in particular. Why are so many buildings today white? Has that always been the fashion there? White is what we tourists expect, but is that white authentic for the Cycladic islands in particular? John has researched the answers to these questions, visiting the islands and examining the walls of older buildings, looking for traces of the ‘lost colours’ and their history. An enthusiastic cook, he has also taken the opportunity to sample – and weave into his researches – the cuisine of the Greek islands. Parallels emerge between colour and food, driven largely by the same external forces.

Like The Colours of Rome, this new title has colour at its core. Standard copies take the form of the case-bound book presented within a sleeve to the inside of which is attached a portfolio of twenty large, individually hand-painted cards illustrating the representative colours that John found, together with a swatch card with colour chips of each. Within the book there is coverage of each of the colours accompanied by further hand-painted chips. The colour paints used here have been specially mixed to match John’s field records. The book itself is bound in full cloth that has been silk-screened with stripes in the colours of the Greek national flag. The sleeve is a simple case, bound in blue cloth with a spine label, and the portfolio is formed from a heavy mid-grey paper.

Each of the de luxe copies comes in a solander box bound in full blue cloth with a spine label. It contains, as well as a standard copy of the book as described above, photographs of two advertisements for a major local paint supplier who operated in the islands in the nineteenth-century, and the means to choose your own colour scheme for the front of a local café. For the latter, John has prepared a line-drawing of the café which we have then printed on a sheet of Arches Acquarelle; John has in turn coloured the drawing in water-colours and we have cut out those areas representing the walls and tympanum (it has a classical form) so that the coloured sheets beneath it appear.

You can see the structure and contents of both editions by using the 'View' links above. Both editions are the same height and depth as corresponding editions of The Colours of Rome.

There are 135 copies of the standard edition and 30 of the de luxe (which are ALL SOLD). The text has been printed letterpress in 14pt Monotype Perpetua, with headings in digital Steinantik. Six linocuts by John are scattered through the text. The text paper is 140gsm Madrid Litho from the Somerset mill. The page size is 315 mm by 225 mm. 54pp. Standard edition copies are £185 each. (The de luxe copies were £350 each.)

Alchemy of the Planets

Images by Philip Hughes and poems by Carmen Boullosa, inspired by space missions past and present

My enthusiasm for all things space is shared by British artist Philip Hughes who contacted me in 2016 to ask if we would be interested in another collaboration with him and leading Mexican poet and novelist Carmen Boullosa. Of course! Our previous collaboration was the successful Jump of the Manta Ray (see below).

Hughes's work has in the past been based mainly on landscape with a special interest in remote areas, archaeology, topography, and maps. To date his work has been terrestrial, but in his new book, his reach extends beyond Earth. Alchemy of the Planets has been inspired by the wealth of stunning and varied images from recent missions to planets and moons within our solar system. These include the New Horizons mission which in 2015 gave us our very first close-ups of Pluto, and in 2016 the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, the Cassini-Huygens mission to Saturn (soon to end), and the probe Dawn to the dwarf planet Ceres between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter.

Philip has created a total of thirty-two works relating to twelve planetary bodies, derived from images selected from those sent back by planetary missions, as well as from the Hubble Space Telescope and the International Space Station, images of distant landscapes that have provided the source inspiration for paintings, pastels, and digital collages.

He and Carmen have collaborated before on two artist’s books in which Philip illustrated Carmen's’s poems. This time it is Carmen who has been inspired by Philip's images, producing two poetic responses, a set of short poems – pies – and a further set of longer poems – cantos. In order to develop more clearly the association between the pictures of the planets and their moons and the names attributed to various celestial bodies, she researched into mythology, beginning by re-reading Hesiod’s Theogony and studying the rituals attached to their worship as described in his Orphic Hymns. In turn Psiche Hughes has worked closely with these texts to create an intimate translation. The Spanish and English texts sit together on the page, facing Philip’s image.

Philip’s images have been printed on an eight-colour Epson 3800, here at The Old School Press and by Philip's studio manager Amy Petra Woodward at his studio, onto 225gsm Somerset Enhanced Velvet which is then mounted on a stygian-black Vélin Arches Noir paper echoing the blackness of space. This is in turn is mounted on the inner right-hand side of a fold of 330gsm Somerset Velvet, the inner left-hand side carrying Carmen’s poetic response to the image in Spanish and English – pies and cantos. The texts have been hand-set in 18pt Hunt Roman and printed letterpress.

The folds for each planet or moon are connected to form a longer zigzag, each zigzag being held in a fold of translucent paper. A separate eight-page document brings together the title page, a text on the origins of the book, an introductory poem by Carmen (in Spanish and English), details of the interplanetary missions that were the sources of the images, and a colophon signed by the collaborators. All these items are then contained in a case bearing a screen-printed image by Philip on the lid. The case is formed from a lightweight aluminium/polypropylene sandwich and closes with a magnetic catch.

As some of the introductory text, as well as the large titles, could not be set in Hunt Roman, we have chosen to have them set in Spectrum which was the typeface for which Hermann Zapf designed Hunt Roman to act as a display face.

Philip has also prepared two etchings based on his images of Neptune and Pluto; buyers can enhance their copy of the book by selecting one of these for inclusion. Each etching is printed on a sheet of 300gsm Somerset Satin White to the same size as the zigzags, but allowing it to be framed separately if desired, and signed and numbered by Philip within its own edition of thirty. Additionally, buyers can select three of the thirty-two images in the book and receive prints of them, fifty per cent larger in each dimension, printed on 330gsm Somerset Enhanced Satin, signed by Philip, and ready for framing.

The edition is limited to sixty numbered copies, of which fifty are for sale at £1,900 each. Each copy is signed by all the collaborators. A paper prospectus is available on request.

Stockholm Reflections

Modern and ancient responses to the vibrant Stockholm waterfront, with digital images by Leslie Gerry

Years ago, I bought a copy of The Britain of Brian Cook, a survey of the work of the artist who, in particular, designed the covers for the Batsford series of books on the British landscape. Cook worked with flat colours from a distinctive palette. I even considered collecting The British Heritage Series but, sensibly probably, decided against the idea. However, when The Whittington Press published its book Portmeirion I had to have a copy for the wonderful illustrations by Leslie Gerry.

Leslie works in a similar way, now of course using digital tools, and he has created a dozen large-scale and very striking illustrations of Stockholm, in particular its evocative waterfront. Many years ago (many, many years ago) Angela and I lived in Stockholm, right in the Old Town (Gamla Stan), so the island on which it stands, the waterfronts around it and on neighbouring islands, and the bustle of boats and ships were all five minutes' walk from our front door and we have fond memories of it all, both in the bright long summer days and the short winter days when the ice-breakers cleared the way for the Finland ferries and I could walk to work across Lake Mälaren. So when we met Leslie and heard about his project it became a must for The Old School Press.

Leslie's eleven images occupy a landscape sheet 370mm tall by 560mm wide (that's about 14.5 inches by 22 inches) and they are compiled as a concertina-fold book, with a further illustration on the title page and two more on the front and back covers of the book. His illustrations are very much his personal response to the beauty of the place, to the colour and vibrancy imparted by the boats, the buildings, the sky and the water. (For a much reduced version of one of the images click on the button above.) His pleasure on first coming across the area echoes that of those who found their way to Stockholm in the eighteenth century and so to accompany the images we have printed extracts from travel books from as early as 1720. Putting letterpress text together with giclée digital images has become quite a habit here at The Old School Press; for us the two techniques are unrivalled for quality and I have no doubt that Caxton would have preferred giclée to woodcuts if he could have! So once again, expect clean letterpress from freshly-cast type combined with brilliantly rendered colour in a novel binding.

The text occupies an eight-page section printed by letterpress on a pale-blue hand-made paper from the Velké Losiny mill in the Czech Republic. The choice of typeface is also new departure for The Old School Press: Eric Gill’s Joanna in the 14pt size, with headings in variations of Gill Sans.

The book's binding is quarter-cloth with the further illustrations by Leslie on the boards and it is presented in a solander box bound in a dark blue-grey cloth. Use the button above to watch a short video that takes you through the book.

The edition is just 95 copies, priced at £295 each.

Palladio's Homes

Andrea Palladio on building a home, and what others have thought of those that he built, illustrated by Carlo Rapp, with an essay by Witold Rybczynski
 

We have had a keenness for the domestic architecture of Andrea Palladio for some time - if one can refer to the villas he built for, say, the Venetian nobility as just 'domestic'. Anyway, we can say that he designed houses for people to live in as well as grand civic buildings.

Palladio designed perhaps thirty domestic villas of which about nineteen survive (the exact numbers depending on how you count them). His influence on subsequent architecture in the UK and USA was considerable and remains to this day - 'Palladianism' entered the vocabulary of architects world-wide. He left not only a legacy of fine buildings, but also a detailed exposition of his ideas in his I Quattro Libri dell'Architettura ('The Four Books of Architecture'), first published in 1570. Palladio prefaced his descriptions of his villa designs in I Quattro Libri with chapters laying out his general principles for the placing and design of villas. This new title, Palladio's Homes, reprints those chapters in the original Italian together with a parallel translation by the English architect Isaac Ware who in 1738 provided, unlike previous translators, a faithful translation as well as accurate reproductions of Palladio's numerous original plates.

I Quattro Libri was considered so important by later architects that they would travel to Italy to see Palladio's work for themselves, scribbling their own views in the margins of their copies. This new title includes these and other reflections - not always complimentary - alongside Palladio's descriptions of his work. Amongst those quoted are architects Inigo Jones and Sir Edward Lovett Pearce, Goethe, sixteenth-century power-walker Thomas Coryat (of Coryat's Crudities fame), and a more recent visitor, Witold Rybczynski, Professor of Urbanism at the University of Pennsylvania, who recorded his own visits in the 1990s in The Perfect House. Professor Rybczynski has written a new essay on Palladio and his legacy for Palladio's Homes.

The texts present a wonderful opportunity to celebrate Italian printing as well as one of its greatest architects. We have printed the text on a Cartiera Amatruda paper hand-made in Amalfi using Giovanni Mardersteig's Dante typeface in the 14D size. Italian artist Signor Carlo Rapp has prepared illustrations for seven of the thirteen villas covered, using linocuts and pen and ink drawings. The book is 36.5cm tall by 26.5cm wide (14 3/8 in. by 10 3/8 in.), has 112 pages, and is quarter-bound in dark grey cloth. The boards are covered with a splendid three-pulp paper by Cave Paper of Minneapolis called 'Cloudy Sky', and the book is presented in a robust wrap of board covered in the same cloth as the spine. Both book and wrap carry a spine label.

The edition consists of 170 copies. The price per copy is £250.  (ISBN 978 1 899933 24 2)

We can also offer sets of sheets for £120 each. The book has a slightly unusual collation, necessary to avoid sewing through illustrations that span an opening: two 16-page sections, one 12-page section, fourteen 4-page sections and one 16-page section. In our binding of the book, the 4-page sections (i.e. two leaves each) are glued on the fold, and not sewn. The page height is 356mm, the page width is 250mm.

At nightfall on the shortest day

An evocative text by Peter Davidson with a wood-engraving by Paul Kershaw

Peter Davidson first wrote for us in Winter Light, two complementary narratives, one following the sequence of Hugh Buchanan’s fourteen watercolours as the light and colours change with the moving season, another taking us on a visitor’s winter journey, moving now through space as well as time.

In this new text, Peter describes the emotions, scents, and failing light of twilight as night approaches in the north of the country. It is both warm and melancholy.

When I turned to the question of illustration, the topic and mood immediately made me think of Paul Kershaw - one of his delicate and luminous engravings of the Isle of Skye is on the wall above where I set type. Paul has engraved an image which has been tipped in; it is formed by two blocks, that were printed separately. One captures a river between distant hills and mountains beneath a brooding stormy sky, the other a menhir surmounting a hill in the foreground, caught in a shaft of sunlight.

The book consists of a single 16pp section sewn into a cover of a soft, mottled hand-made paper from the Larroque mill. The text has been hand-set in 14pt Fournier italic and printed on an antique laid paper. There is a small edition of fifty-five copies of which forty-five are for sale at £55 each.

An Italian Dream

Charles Dickens thinks he has been to Venice, but isn't sure

Some years back I came across a wonderful description of the interior of St Mark's Basilica in Venice and discovered it had been written by Charles Dickens. It didn't take too much help from various search engines to discover that it was from his book Pictures of Italy and to find the text, in particular of chapter VII, online at Project Gutenberg. I squirrelled it away planning to print it when the opportunity arose, and finally that moment came.

In this chapter, Dickens describes his visit to La Serenissima as if remembering a dream that happened between two other, more prosaic stops on his tour. 'In the luxurious wonder of so rare a dream, I took but little heed of time, and had but little understanding of its flight. But there were days and nights in it; and when the sun was high, and when the rays of lamps were crooked in the running water, I was still afloat, I thought: plashing the slippery walls and houses with the cleavings of the tide, as my black boat, borne upon it, skimmed along the streets.'

I had the text set automatically from the digital copy in 12pt Poliphilus by Harry McIntosh at Speedspools. Poliphilus is a type based closely on that cut by Francesco Griffo and used for Aldus Manutius's Hypnerotomachia Poliphili which was published in Venice in 1499. I printed the text on a dampened hand-made paper from Cartiera Amatruda in Amalfi, a stock of which I bought from Christopher Skelton's estate some years back. Complementing that are end-papers of a burgundy-coloured Magnani Firenze, another Italian hand-made. The book consists of a single section of 16pp sewn into boards. The front cover carries a photograph, digitally manipulated, that I took on a rather misty day from Dorsoduro, towards San Giorgio, though the latter was not to be seen through the mist. The edition is 135 copies. The price is £36. (ISBN 978-1-899933-25-9)

Jump of the Manta Ray

A poem in Spanish by Carmen Boullosa, translated by Psiche Hughes, with images by Philip Hughes

Inspired by the sight of a giant manta ray leaving the water, Mexican poet Carmen Boullosa has written this epic and erotic poem for which Psiche Hughes has prepared an English translation. The two texts run in parallel, interspersed with twenty-nine images by Philip Hughes. A further twenty images accompany the book in a portfolio.

Hughes has worked before with Boullosa on a cycle of lithographs to accompany her epic poem The Elysian Garden, also translated by his wife Psiche. For this new collaboration he has prepared over fifty photographic images, digitally manipulated, echoing the imagery of the poem, and taken from seas and sea-shores around the globe. The Tate Gallery in St Ives and the Victoria & Albert Museum in London in particular have shown exhibitions of his work.

Copies have been purchased by the Library of Congress, Washington, DC, and the British Library Special Collections Department, London. A number of major collections in the USA have also obtained copies.

The book was short-listed for a British Book Design and Production Award in the 'Limited Edition / Fine Binding' section in November 2003.

When we first received the texts and images from Philip and Psiche Hughes it was clear that a powerful image needed a robust design. Choosing a typeface was hard. It needed strength with dignity, and the only metal face that I could imagine working was Will Carter's sinewy Octavian. This was easier said than done: only three sets of matrices were sold by Monotype for the face, which was only ever cut in 14pt - an ideal size for this book however. (For more of the story behind this, click on the 'cuttings' button above to read cuttings from our newsletters.) The result has been very gratifying, the face printing beautifully on the heavy Somerset paper we have chosen to complement the Somerset Velvet which is the chosen paper for giclée printers. A bright red solander box and one of Claire Maziarczyk's bold silver grey checks on the book and the portfolio carry through the theme of strength. The images pack a real punch, the vibrant colours looking wonderful - and 100% cotton papers and the latest in archival-quality inks mean that longevity is assured.

A solander box in red cloth holds the book and a portfolio. The text is printed letterpress on 175gsm Somerset paper, making a handsome book of about 340mm (13.4 inches) high and 300mm (11.8 inches) wide. Twenty large images (170mm square) have been printed on 330gsm Somerset Velvet paper: they come on separate sheets in the portfolio, all signed and numbered by the artist. Two other images act as frontis- and tail-piece for the book. Twenty-nine smaller images (70mm square) appear throughout the text. All the images are listed in an index locating them to the sites where Hughes took the original photographs, from Scotland to Antarctica. A Maziarczyk paste paper covers the boards of the book and the portfolio, each of which has a grey spine. The edition consists of 60 copies of which 50 are for sale. Each copy is signed by the poet, translator, artist, and printer.

The price per copy is £1,500. (ISBN 978 1 899933 15 0)

More images and some samples, exhibitions, and talks about the book . . .

Between 20 July and 22 August 2004, Jump of the Manta Ray was on show at Association artothèque, in Château La Nerthe, near Châteauneuf-du-Pape, France.

Amongst the images in Jump of the Manta Ray are some from Antarctica, taken when Philip was there as an official artist. His major one-man exhibition In Antarctica was held in September/October 2003 at Francis Kyle Gallery.

The book and associated images were shown at an exhibition of Hughes's work at the Sherman Galleries in Sydney, Australia, in November 2002. A further exhibition was held at the Drill Hall Gallery, in Canberra, Australia, between 7 November and 15 December 2002.

tokonoma

Twenty haiku and tanka by James Kirkup with wood cuts by Naoko Matsubara

For something rather different, the Press collaborated with Canadian artist Naoko Matsubara in the making of an editioned piece that presents a collection of twenty haiku and tanka by James Kirkup, whose collection of poems Figures in a Setting we published in 1996. Each verse has been printed letterpress in large foundry Perpetua on a sheet of Japanese hand-made paper specially made by Masao Seki and accompanied by a striking woodcut by Naoko Matsubara. The images have been printed in one, two, or five colours by fine art printer Alan Flint in Canada under Matsubara's supervision.
In issue 5 of Parenthesis, Reiko Yamanouchi wrote 'The result is brilliant and beautiful, deeply satisfying to the senses. Martyn Ould is to be congratulated for having published . . . such a sumptuous work, embodying the best of handwork and a perfect harmony of art and poetry, and also presenting a world in which European and Japanese cultures are subtly and happily merged.'

The verses are complemented by a short essay on the writing of haiku and tanka by James Kirkup and on the concept of tokonoma itself. A tokonoma is an alcove in the home in which, for instance, a picture or scroll can be placed for meditation. To achieve the desired effect, the sheets are housed in a box constructed to allow one verse at a time to be displayed, much as one might display a photograph or favourite picture. The twenty-five sheets (each about 33cm by 26cm) are held in a tray covered in black cloth with a perspex lid. The back of the tray allows it to stand so that the top sheet is displayed. A slip case protects the whole. This hybrid of book and picture means that the poetry and pictures need never be fully hidden as they would be in the pages of a shelved book, but can be changed with time or whim. Every copy is signed by the four collaborators.

There is an edition of 105 copies of which 85 are for sale. Price is £490. (ISBN 978 1 899933 05 1)

A four-page prospectus with colour reproductions of two of the sheets is available on request : just contact us via the 'contact' button on the left.

Zapf and Stauffacher

The story of a collaboration between type designer and typographer, by Ferdinand Ulrich

When the Hunt Roman type was first made available to the Hunt Botanical Library in Pittsburgh (now the Hunt Institute for Botanical Documentation), the event was marked by the publication of a slim volume entitled Hunt Roman: the birth of a type. It noted that the new type came about as 'the fruition of a combination of ideals, concepts, and convictions of three personalities', those personalities being Mrs Hunt, after whom the Institute is named, type designer Hermann Zapf, and typographic designer and printer Jack Stauffacher. The type was first used in 1963, by Stauffacher, for a symposium programme.

While a visiting student at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh in 2010, German typographer and type historian Ferdinand Ulrich came across the legendary type in the hot-metal setting workshop of the university. His subsequent intensive research in archives and collections, a stay with Stauffacher in San Francisco, and correspondence and meetings with Hermann Zapf have led to lectures and journal articles on this historic type, and in this essay he reveals how the collaboration between Zapf and Stauffacher developed in the 1960s.

Hunt Roman was not designed to serve as a text type, being intended as a display face to accompany Spectrum, and it was originally cut in 14pt, 18pt, and 24pt, though a 12pt was later prepared. We hold the three larger sizes. Hunt is noteworthy for its short ascenders and descenders, making it appear much larger than its body size would suggest - the 14pt could easily be guessed as 18pt and so on. Nevertheless with careful choice of line length and leading it looks very fine on the page and we are of course hand-setting Ferdinand's text in Hunt Roman cast by Stempel.

The essay runs to 3,400 words and it has been printed on hand-made paper from the Czech Velké Losiny mill and presented in a format similar to the recent Venice Approached: a single section sewn between boards. There is a photograph frontispiece of Zapf and Stauffacher in conversation. The edition consists of 125 copies of which 100 are for sale. Copies are £75 each. (ISBN 978 1 899933 35 8)

Paper making by hand in 1953

A valuable description of the process of making paper by hand at Barcham Green's Hayle Mill

In 1953 English paper-makers J. Barcham Green Ltd issued a modest booklet describing in detail the process of making paper at their Hayle Mill – a small but valuable historical record of actual practice. A thousand copies were printed on Barcham Green papers but, perhaps because of its somewhat ephemeral nature, it is seldom seen. It was reprinted in 1960 and again in 1967 in slightly varying forms, but in this reprint we have returned to the original text.

Whilst we have not tried to produce an exact facsimile of the booklet, we have followed the flavour of the original in structure and typography. So, in particular, the cover carries the title and the delightful silhouette of the vatman that appeared on the cover of the original.

The text was written by John Barcham Green and is splendidly detailed in its description of the process, and in a style almost like that of Moxon describing printing processes in his Mechanick Exercises. As such is is an important authoritative text by one of England's greatest paper makers.

The original 1953 edition included sixteen photographs of the process as described, showing workers at the mill, poised at the various stages – at the vat, couching, drying, etc. – but they were small and not ideally printed as half-tones. With the kind help of Simon Barcham Green, we have been fortunate to have had access to better prints of the photographs and these have been scanned for giclée printing at The Old School Press on our eight-colour Epson 3800 printer. The original booklet was somewhat constrained by the small amount of space available, so some photographs were severely cropped thereby losing interesting detail, and then printed at a small scale. For our reprint we have printed the entire original photograph in each case, without cropping, on an A5 (210 x 148mm) sheet of Hahnemühle Photo Rag Baryta.

The text of the booklet has been printed on Barcham Green's Finale paper – it was the last paper made at the mill before it closed in 1987 – and the cover on their Chatham Royal. Both papers were damped for printing. The text makes twenty pages and has been printed in 12pt Monotype Caslon with the titles in various sizes of Caslon Old Face from the Stephenson Blake foundry. (You can see a little about the printing of the text on damped hand-made paper by clicking on the 'progress' button above.) The binding takes the form of a simple case covered in Barcham Green's Antique Rose, with a pocket on the inside of each board, one holding the booklet and the other holding the sixteen photographs loose together with a sheet of captions. The case is 280mm by 175mm, the booklet 260mm by 160mm.

The edition consists of 130 copies of which 100 are for sale. Copies are £105 each. (ISBN 978 1 899933 42 6)

Making paper at Abbey Mills

Instructions for making paper from esparto grass, and more, printed on a selection of Abbey Mills papers

Abbey Mills was a paper mill in the Grosvenor Chater Group which closed in the 1990s. Situated in North Wales, it took advantage of good water and a port nearby that could bring in raw materials. In the last century it specialised in high-quality papers such as Basingwerk Parchment, Greenfield, and Royal Cornwall which it introduced in the 1920s. A speciality of the mill was making paper from esparto grass.

Amongst the archives of the mill we found a typescript, written in the 1920s by the then manager, describing in some detail the processing of the esparto grass, and this text is at the heart of our new book. It has of course been printed on a stock of Basingwerk, a fine and quite heavy, opaque paper with a creamy colour. We also acquired a collection of a dozen batches of coloured papers from the mill and so looked for a way to incorporate them. For some time I've had a copy of the Abbey Mills paper specimen book produced in 1958, with texts and illustrations designed to show off their range of papers. Whilst we don't have such a range, we've used the coloured papers now here at the press to make something along the same lines.

For the material printed on the coloured leaves we've taken our inspiration partly from samples in the original specimen book and partly from the 1950s period itself: the 1951 Festival of Britain, the 1953 Coronation, typefaces and texts from the period, various Curwen 'dashes', the two-element Glint ornament, and a personal favourite, the Festival display face; and it's been an opportunity to pull out many of our text founts - Dante, Perpetua, Octavian, Caslon Old Face, Fournier - all hand-set of course. The main text is set in 12pt Romulus with Optima headings. The whole thing runs to 64 pages and is case bound with a letterpress-printed pattern-paper on the boards.

The edition consists of 65 copies of which 60 are for sale. Copies are £85 each. (ISBN 978 1 899933 21 1)

Only the printer knows

The story of a book from The Old School Press that nearly never was

Thirty years after we published our first book, Venice Approached, it seemed fitting to mark 2022 in some way. Perhaps unconventionally, we have done this not with a conspectus of our output over those three decades but instead with a book about the travails of printing, and about the serendipitous but disaster-laden story of one book in particular, our tenth, Venice Visited.

Venice Visited was five years in the making and was the product of much luck and much angst. Each of the components that went into the book had its story: the type, the text paper, the illustrations, the cover papers, the printing. At one point things went so badly wrong the project was very nearly abandoned. This book tells the story.

Only the printer knows runs to twenty-four large pages, the text hand-set in 14pt Dante, and printed on a dampened hand-made laid paper. The paper probably dates from the 1930s. It came originally from Oxford University Press, via Whittington Press who acquired the remaining stocks of OUP's hand-made papers when the Printing House closed. John Bidwell examined this paper and reckoned that it was part of the making by Batchelor for the Bruce Rogers Lectern Bible published in 1933. As such the paper has had a history. This book has been printed on folded half-sheets and we decided to keep the deckle edges and not to have the bottom and fore edges trimmed even though some have become a little dusty - it is part of the paper's history.

There are three variants in an edition totalling 60 copies. The book itself is quarter-bound with bright yellow cloth on the spine, and a paper by Jemma Lewis (gold splatter on plum) on the boards, 350mm by 250mm, in all three variants. Each copy contains a four-page fold from the original book and a copy of the original four-page prospectus. There is a paper label on the front board.

Variant A comprises the book and a selection of fifty-nine letterpress past ephemeral items from the Press in a clamshell archive box, together with a collection of ‘overs’ sheets from twenty-three past books also in a clamshell archive box, the two boxes held in a two-piece drop-front archive box. All the boxes bear paper labels. £220. ALL SOLD

Variant B comprises the book and a selection of about forty letterpress past ephemeral items from the Press in a clamshell archive box, together with a collection of ‘overs’ sheets from about fifteen past books also in a clamshell archive box, the two boxes held in a two-piece drop-front archive box. All the boxes bear paper labels.  £165. ALL SOLD

Variant C is the book on its own. £90.

Printing at the University Press, Oxford, 1660-1780

The first definitive narrative about work at one of the greatest of English presses, in three volumes

In November 2013 Oxford University Press published a major four-volume history of itself. In 2008 I had been asked to write a chapter for volume I, specifically about the operation of the printing side during the hugely important period from 1668 to 1780 which began with the formation of the free-standing Press under John Fell and his partners. As I worked on my chapter it became apparent that, although historian Harry Carter and bibliographer Falconer Madan had delved into many aspects of the topic, their coverage was fragmented, scattered here and there through their writings. There was evidently no single continuous narrative that told the story of the day-to-day business of printing. It is that gap that this book now fills.

This title, the most ambitious in its research and extent from The Old School Press, is a three-volume work. Volume I covers three key resources of the Press (in particular the Learned Press) and their development: the premises they occupied and how they were used, the management organisation that ran the Press, and the paper it used and its sources. Volume II covers the type it used and its sources. Each of these resources is dealt with chronologically in order to show the changes that occurred and why, as well as providing the foundations for the third volume. Volume III covers the processes of the Learned Press, detailing how a book progressed from its author's copy, via compositor, corrector, press-crew, and rolling-press man to the Warehouse ready for sale.

Throughout my researches I have aimed at basing the entire narrative in contemporary documents, rather than relying on later commentators and writers. I have - much as in The Fell Revival and Stanley Morison & 'John Fell' - tried to let the players of the time speak for themselves through their letters, notes, and accounts, and also to provide the necessary background to what was happening at the time both in Oxford and the wider world as it impinged on work at the Press.

Each of the three volumes contains reproductions of manuscripts from Oxford University Press archives, Oxford University archives, and the Bodleian Library, all published for the first time. Each standard edition is of 200 copies (including ten sets of sheets for binders) and there is a further de luxe edition of fifty copies which comes bound in quarter leather in a slipcase with additional material: with volume I there is Correspondence on Paper, transcriptions of a collection of hitherto unpublished correspondence from the London paper dealers to the Press in the 1670s; with volume II a portfolio of leaves from books printed across the period illustrating the changes in types and typography; and with volume III an extended essay - Learning about Printing - on the business planning done by Fell's partner Thomas Yate at the time that they set up their press in 1671-2, including many clues to productivity and pay at the time.

All three volumes are printed in Monotype Van Dijck on Mohawk Superfine and their size and binding are the same as for our previous titles on OUP (such as the two noted above).

For further details on each, including prices, click on the links above.

(I had originally intended a fourth volume, on the Bible Press at Oxford, but decided that the material was not suited to a letterpress production. Instead the research has been published in two papers for the Journal of the Printing Historical Society in 2019. It breaks entirely new ground with its coverage of the workings of the Bible Press towards the end of the period through a statistical analysis of the weekly accounts; such an analysis has only been possible for a handful of other presses, and I believe this will be the first for one such as Oxford's Bible Press which printed hundreds of thousands of Bibles and prayer books each year. The analysis is based on the weekly accounts for a three-year period from December 1769. We know how much which men were paid for composing and printing which sheets of which Bible or prayer-book. Further, by combining that detailed data with an examination of the books themselves, in particular the so-called 'press figures' with which sheets were marked, it has been possible to deduce much about the dynamics of the Bible printing house.)

The Daniel Press in Frome

The Daniel family and their press in Frome, by David Chambers and Martyn Ould

Falconer Madan, one-time Bodley's Librarian, wrote the definitive bibliography of the Daniel Press, and had it printed on Daniel's own Albion and published in 1921, and one might reckon that little more was to be said on the topic. Not true!

The books that Daniel printed and published from Worcester College in Oxford are relatively well known and by and large still to be had. Reproductions of pages from those fifty or so titles are also frequently seen. But in his bibliography, Madan also covers the less known output of Charles Henry Olive Daniel and his family from their home in Frome, Somerset. This domestic press dates from Henry's early years. But it was picked up by two of his brothers, Eustace and William, while he was away at school and later studying in London and then Oxford. After Henry had left home and established himself, and his press, at Worcester College, Oxford, the brothers and their father continued printing small items, in particular for the church at which Daniel's father was vicar (a post that Eustace was later to take over). Some were clearly juvenile and rather amateur works, including nine items that Madan refers to as 'books' and also hundreds of other items that are classed under the heading of 'Frome minor pieces' (of which some are but 'minima'). Much of it was ephemeral material for use in running the church. In contrast to the Oxford books, these are as good as unknown and almost never seen.

This title, we hope, redresses the balance and provides insights not only into the early work of a formative private press but also the role of an amateur press in its social setting. Henry's father was vicar of Holy Trinity Church, Frome and their home was the Georgian vicarage next door, a fine house that is now a private residence. Daniel and his brothers and father printed a large number of items for the church's daily affairs as well as items for more general consumption including bookplates for over fifty family members and friends. David Chambers and I tracked down, examined, and catalogued seven substantial collections of the Frome output amounting to over 1,000 pieces, and, taken together, they provided many insights into 'The Daniel Press in Frome'. Moreover, we found more than a hundred items not catalogued by Madan and these we have of course meticulously listed. Madan himself also recorded more information about the items in his own albums than he published in his bibliography and we have taken the opportunity to print the missing material in our book.

There are 72pp of text printed letterpress in 12pt Caslon on a pale blue laid paper by T. Edmonds and 48pp of photographs and scans of some of these rarest of items from the Daniel Press. We gathered the latter from five collections including the Bodleian Library and Worcester College, Oxford. There are also two tip-in reproductions of Daniel items, one by Henry and the other by his brother Eustace - they have been printed on a Ruthven parlour press of the same design as that used by the Daniel family themselves. You can watch a short video of the tip-ins being printed on the Ruthven here. The edition is of 175 copies.

The contents are as follows:

Preface 
Introduction 
The Daniels, Frome, and the church 
The output of the Frome Press 
Charles Henry Olive Daniel 
Wilson Eustace Daniel (part 1) 
William Nathaniel Arnold Daniel 
The Revd Alfred Daniel 
George Alfred Daniel 
Wilson Eustace Daniel (part 2) 
Henry Daniel 
The Ruthven Press 
Sizes of editions and their printers 
Addenda to the bibliography 
The bookplates 
Bibliography 
The plates 

 

The binding is quarter-cloth with a blue Hahnemühle Bugra Bütten paper on the boards to a size and style that matches Falconer Madan's bibliography of the Daniel Press and our title Printing at the Daniel Press (see below). £125. Ten sets of sheets are reserved for binders at £50 each.

Tonge's Travels

The diary of an Oxford undergraduate: the Mediterranean by cargo steamer in 1857

I have always enjoyed travel writing, especially when it shows travel in its true light: general awfulness punctuated by moments of great pleasure. Some years ago I acquired a manuscript diary which, a recent handwritten slip inside suggests, was written by George Tonge who went up to Lincoln College, Oxford in 1856, and subsequently entered the Church.

According to his diary, George Tonge (if indeed it was he) had decided that the Long Vacation at the end of his first year would be spent on some form of voyage, and, in the event, on 15 July 1857 he boarded the screw steamer Avon which was headed for the Mediterranean in search of a cargo of currants. The 282 manuscript pages of his diary take us on a ten-week journey to Gibraltar, Genoa, Pisa, Naples, Vesuvius (avoiding falling debris), Pompeii, a detour on foot and horse to Corinth, Athens (which clearly made a deep impression on him), Vastitza ('began loading early and shipped about 80 tons of currants', 'had a bathe close to the vessel with a man looking out for sharks'), and back via Algiers. Stowaways are put back on land, the rigging breaks, the engineer blows himself up, and bandits are avoided. For a flavour of the diarist's writing, click on the 'excerpt' button to the left.

There is a single edition of 290 bound copies plus forty sets of sheets reserved for binders. The book is in a generous landscape format (230mm high by 300mm wide) to allow the text to run in double columns and provide the right shape for twenty-four watercolours and sketches by John Watts, much as a traveller of the day might have committed sights and thoughts to paper where today we would use video and digital images. John's illustrations have been reproduced by off-set litho. Printing a diary also gives us another excuse for using the written as well as the printed word in the book: snippets of Tonge's account have been hand-written by calligrapher Patricia Gidney and printed letterpress.

The text has been printed letterpress in 12/14pt Monotype Centaur on Mohawk Superfine eggshell finish paper, and copies are bound in full cloth with a dust-jacket bearing one of John Watts's line drawings. 114pp. A four-page announcement, with two of the watercolours and a sample text page, is available on request: just send your name and postal address via our contact form using the 'contact' button on the left.

The price is £80 for bound copies, and £50 for sheets. (ISBN 978 1 899933 08 2)

American binder Nancy Bloch of the Lemon Tree Press has done a fine binding of Tonge's Travels which featured in a major exhibition - Women in Letters - at the Clark Library at UCLA in 2007.

TankAlphabet

An alphabet book of tanka by James Kirkup

In 1924, the bookseller-editor René Hilsum commissioned the great poet Paul Valéry to write twenty-four prose poems to accompany lettrines (ornamental capitals). The letters K and W which are rare in French were omitted. The series, representing the twenty-four hours of the day, were engraved by Louis Jou. Valéry published a few of these alphabet poems, but the collection itself remained unfinished and unedited.

Drawing on the archives of Valériana in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, Michel Jarrety established an edition under the title Alphabet, published in 1999. For certain letters, more than one prose poem was composed, some of them accompanied by the poet's own delicate watercolours. James Kirkup was inspired by this unique literary/ typographical concept to compose a tanka sequence, twenty-nine in all, on the letters of the alphabet. The use of the 31-syllable Japanese tanka form in 5-line stanzas gives the concept a unity somewhat lacking in Valéry's interpretation.

Kirkup's delightful and poised verses are printed in Monotype Fournier Molé Foliate initials on a stock of Renage près Rives hand-made paper originally bought by the Carthusian Monastery at Parkminster, Sussex. The verses and introduction are printed on five half sheets of the Rives, and each half-sheet is folded to form four horizontal panels, the folded sheets then being wrapped in a cover of heavy hand-made paper from the Larroque mill in a delicious blue-green and tied with a ribbon. There are 190 copies at £15 each. (ISBN 978 1 899933 09 9)

De Sitv Dvnelmi – On Durham

The last poem in Old English, translated and introduced by David Crane, with a nineteenth century wood-engraving

The last extant poem in the Anglo-Saxon poetic tradition is The Old English Durham Poem. It tells of the site in the North of England on which the city has been built and the relics of the saints assembled there. David Crane has provided an introduction to his new translation of the poem, a translation that matches the metrical structure and alliteration of the original. It is printed in hand-set Stephenson Blake Caslon Old Face (including the 10, 12, 14, 18, 22 and 30pt) on Zerkall mould-made paper, and sewn into a wrapper of heavy, hammered Zerkall.

The trade edition of about 250 copies (ISBN 978 1 899933 02 0) has 12pp and is available at £6 each. A nineteenth century wood-engraving, found in the stock of a Durham printer, has been printed from the wood. (An ordinary edition of about 50 copies (ISBN 978 1 899933 03 7) (all sold) also contained an additional line drawing by Wendy Batt of an interior from Durham Cathedral and an additional wrapper of kozo handmade paper, £18 each. Sheets of the trade edition in a slightly different collation of two gatherings of three sheets each are available for binders for £10 each.

Five Contemporary British Poets

A series of collections of new work by British poets

To provide an early focus for its work in printing poetry, The Old School Press published a series of five books, each consisting of new work by a contemporary British poet, accompanied by illustrations by British artists.

The series is to a uniform external design: quarter bound in yellow cloth with boards covered with a hand-made paper from the Larroque mill. The Larroque paper comes in a range of delicate colours, and a different one is used for each title in the series. Each book bears its title embossed in gold on the front board. The text paper is either 145gsm Zerkall or 170gsm Magnani mould-made paper, and the end papers black Canson Mi Teintes. Each book is about 265mm high and 175mm wide.

Figures in a Setting

A collection of six poems by James Kirkup, with line drawings by John Watts

James Kirkup is well known as a poet and translator, and he also published three novels, six volumes of autobiography, plays, and essays. He has been published in particular by the Sceptre Press, Rockingham Press, Hub Editions, and the University of Salzburg Press. His work appeared in various magazines in Britain, Japan, France and the USA, and he was a frequent obituarist for The Independent newspaper in the UK.

We collaborated with James on two other books: tokonoma and TankAlphabet. Unfortunately we never met (he died in 2009) but correspondence with him was always a pleasure and one would receive a haiku or two occasionally in the post.

In this collection, I have printed previously unpublished poems on the theme of the figure, giving an opportunity of combining each with a full-page line drawing, commissioned from John Watts and reproduced by line block. The text is set in 14pt Centaur italic. The edition is 185 copies signed by poet and artist, priced at £42 per copy. A further thirty sets of sheets were available for binders but are now all sold. (ISBN 978 1 899933 01 3). 24pp.

There is now a website devoted to Kirkup's work.

Chesil Beach

A poem by David Burnett, with a wood-engraving by Christopher Wormell

Number three in the Poetry Series contains a single poem by David Burnett, whose collection Twelve Poems the press published in 1994. The poem is accompanied by a fine wood engraving of Chesil Beach commissioned by David Burnett from Christopher Wormell. The text is set in hand-set Stephenson Blake's Caslon Old Face in a variety of sizes, with the poem in 18pt. The edition is of 215 copies, all signed by poet and artist. £24. (Sets of sheets have all been sold.) (ISBN 978 1 899933 00 6)

As part of a collaboration with binder Owen Bradford, six students at Newcastle University were each given two sets of sheets of Chesil Beach to bind, one set for themselves and one set for The Old School Press.

Lowlands Away

An oratorio in ten parts by Adrian Henri with pastel images by Adrian Henri

Adrian Henri wrote ten poems as texts for an oratorio by Richard Gordon-Smith for soloists, chorus and orchestra, which has recently been recorded on CD by the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra. It tells the story of the loss at sea of the Thames and Medway barge Cynthia, commanded by the composer's great-grandfather, a century before in 1896, and of his last words to his wife, cast into the sea in a bottle and subsequently forwarded to her.

In 2000, at the Six Chapel Row contemporary art gallery in Bath, I discovered that Adrian was also an artist and indeed had trained as one, and it seemed an ideal opportunity to have a poet's work in two forms in the same book. To that end there are eight images, reproduced by four-colour litho at the Senecio Press from Adrian's vibrant pastels. These drawings were the last that Adrian made, in hospital, before his death at the beginning of 2001 - sadly, he never saw the book in its final form, and indeed a couple of the images were unfinished. Yet they are full of life and vigour.

The book follows the binding style of the series: quarter-bound with yellow cloth on the spine, with a hand-made paper from the Larroque mill covering the boards, this time a mottled celadon colour, black Canson end-papers, and the title embossed in gold on the front cover. The text has been printed in 14pt Monotype Gill Sans on Rivoli paper. 32pp. There are 410 copies, £64. (There were forty sets of sheets for binders (all sold).) (ISBN 978 1 899933 12 9)

In 2022 the Hand Bookbinders of California chose Lowlands Away as the set book for their 50th anniversary. The fabulous work of seventeen binders can be viewed here, and there was an online presentation of the bindings by the binders on YouTube. Some bindings are featured here through the button above.

A Long Story

A four-part poem by Andrew Motion, with four wood-engravings by Simon Brett

For the fifth title in our series of the work of contemporary British poets, we were fortunate to have the opportunity of printing an extended four-part poem by Poet Laureate emeritus Andrew Motion.

Writing of his work, Motion says 'A Long Story assembled itself over several years into a loose sequence of four sections, none of them rhymed, and all are written in a very loose, rambling rhythm. I began with the wish to identify certain memories in my childhood which I've always considered to be 'spots of time' - ie, moments which have a self-contained interest and drama - and ended up with scenes which anticipate (even predict) certain moods and attitudes I have as an adult.'

To complement Motion's narrative style, we turned once more to leading wood-engraver Simon Brett, whose ability to tell a story in a single sinewy image we greatly admire, and who cut four wood-engravings for the book.

The text was hand-set in 14pt Fournier italic and printed on 170gsm Magnani mould-made paper. The book follows the series binding style: quarter-bound with yellow cloth on the spine, this time with a rich dark green hand-made paper from the Larroque mill covering the boards, black Canson end-papers, and the title embossed in gold on the front cover. 230 copies. All copies are signed by poet and artist. 44pp.

The price is £72 each for bound copies. Unbound sets of sheets are £50. (ISBN 978 1 899933 14 3)