Last October this somewhat enigmatic and unexciting image appeared on our social media feeds. We were about to start what was probably the largest single job in all our thirty-plus years and there wasn't much we could say about it because it was embargoed. This pallet of paper was the first of several supplied by The Folio Society for If Not Winter: Fragments of Sappho. Unusually for Folio, there were to be no illustrations, and they chose us to print it letterpress to give it something extra.
When we've worked for Folio in the past we've printed from metal type. If Not Winter was too long to make hot metal setting and hand make-up of pages a practical proposition so Folio provided us with PDF artwork from which we had plates made.
Much as we like working with metal type, most of our work these days is printed from plates. We've therefore just bought a plate making machine so that we can produce our own photopolymer plates. One of the jobs we have in mind for it is our next book The Wind in the Willows:
Our edition will be newly illustrated by Judy White and will be designed by Webb & Webb, who have done so much to make our previous publications look as good as they can be. The page size will be 250 x 175 mm and there will be about 200 pages. We expect to publish next spring.
There is also personal project in preparation. My late mother was brought up in Czechoslovakia until she came to London as a refugee at the age of nine. In her later years she worked on a novel, A Faraway Country, based on her experiences of the appalling times she lived through. Angela Barrett, who made such memorable images for our edition of The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, is working on illustrations for it.
