
progress on Pilgrimage Views		A commentary on Henry Maundrell's A Journey from Aleppo to Jerusalem of 1703, with new pulls from the three extant copper engravings
shipping this month
While chaplain to the 'factory' of the Levant Company in Aleppo, Henry Maundrell joined fourteen others in a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. A Journey from Aleppo to Jerusalem at Easter A.D. 1697 is his diary and travelogue. It proved a considerable financial success and it was reprinted at the Oxford Press a further six times in the following half-century. Over the seven editions Michael Burghers - perhaps the finest engraver working on copperplate at the time - engraved thirteen plates for the book, of which just three survive in the Press Archives. Master Printer Jim Nottingham has taken new pulls from them and they are bound into the book; this image shows one of them, entitled 'The Prospect of Balbeck': The text is all hand-set in Monotype Van Dijck and printed in a landscape format on a cream antique laid paper. The book has tipped-in digital prints of all thirteen of Burghers's engravings, either from online sources or reference pulls still present in the OUP Archives. Where we have traced earlier images which Burghers might well have used as his models the book also includes digital copies of those. The following image shows an opening from the book. Our text introduces Maundrell and his journey and examines each of the thirteen plates that Burghers cut as illustrations as we follow in Maundrell's footsteps. A fascinating aspect of our research has been establishing where Burghers probably got the drawings necessary as the basis for his engravings; in several cases it is clear that, following the habit of the time, he 'borrowed' the work of earlier artists in earlier books. On the left-hand side of this opening there is a digital reproduction of an earlier engraving that was probably a source used by Burghers. The book is bound in quarter cloth with a Turkish-style marbled paper by Rachel Maiden on the boards. The book comes in a cloth-covered slipcase. 235mm high x 290mm wide (about 9.25" x 11.5"). 68pp, including the pulls from the three extant plates and a total of twenty-five tipped-in digital reproductions. There are seventy copies, of which fifty-nine are for sale at £245 each, plus shipping. The majority of copies have already been reserved. If you have not yet reserved a copy and would like to do so email us directly now. (If you have already reserved a copy, the price we announced earlier will be honoured.)


Making paper at Abbey Mills		A book from our backlist
£85 plus shipping
The topic of paper increasingly appears in our output, and our book-from-the-backlist this time is about making paper using esparto grass. 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 esparto grass, and this text is at the heart of our 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 have used the coloured papers 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 was 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.


Stockholm Reflections		One copy left!
£285 plus shipping
Some stock checking revealed a single copy remaining of Stockholm Reflections. If you are a fan of Leslie Gerry's striking digital images you will enjoy this book. Just the one copy left, so first come, first served.