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recent
progress on
Henry James Sat Here
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Nine poems on
Siena by
Anne Coon with images by Kurt Feuerherm
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Publication
expected in May 2006
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I had always planned
April as the month for making real inroads into the production of this title and
things have been going well.
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If you received the last newsletter you might remember that it initially looked as
if magnets were going to find a way into the binding of this book! In the event,
following more discussions with Simon Haigh, we decided that the well-known KISS
principle (keep it simple, stupid) should apply and the book will now be a
simple zig-zag held in a Japanese-style binding. Simple but effective. In early
April I visited Brian
Settle at Woolnough Bookbinding and we discussed the binding in sufficient
detail for him
to prepare a dummy.
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I printed the texts
of the poems a few weeks ago: 14pt Octavian in a pale sage green, pressed into
the 225gsm Somerset watercolour paper. Each sheet is a landscape A3. On the
right hand edge a narrow fold will provide a hinge with the next sheet in the
zig-zag, with the remainder of the sheet then folded down in half to give two
slightly-narrower-than-A4 pages, onto one of which I printed the poems. In a
second run I printed the titles in black, under the poems - it can feel a little
over-the-top winding a thousand sheets through the press just to put one or two
words on each!
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I was reminded once
again that no text is ever perfect. I always interleave printed sheets with
other sheets in order to prevent set-off (where ink on one sheet gets onto the
back of the sheet on top of it). As it happened, when printing this new book I was using
as interleaving some sheets from a
proof of The Fell Revival which we published in 2000. Whilst waiting for the ink to even
out on the
rollers I idly read one of the pages ... and noticed a blatant typo, and on
checking it in the final version found it had escaped everyone's notice. :-(
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All of the letterpress for Anne Coon's poems has now been done, leaving just the
title and colophon pages and spine labels to do. I wanted the poem/image pairs
to be uninterrupted when the ends of the zig-zag are brought together to form a
circle - it makes a great way to display the book and its contents (have a look
at the
pictures on my website). The Japanese binding is like a portfolio with two
full-width, fold-over flaps holding the zig-zag, and the two flaps are the
perfect places for the title and colophon pages which therefore become part of
the binding rather than part of the book. Something for the bibliographers to
worry about. The flaps are held in place by small toggles.
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I have started printing Kurt Feuerherm's vibrant images onto the printed sheets
and, as I write, I have nearly forty complete sets now ready. It's a slow business
with each image taking several minutes to print and every sheet having to be
hand-fed, so I tend to keep the Epson 2100 printer chuntering away whenever I am working at
my PC (like now). I get through ink cartridges at a tremendous rate and at £12
(US$20) a pop it's a bit scary but the results are really worth it. I keep
careful records of how many cartridges I get through to produce how many sets of images so
that I can order the necessary number of each of the seven different colours
that are loaded up: matte black, light black (!), cyan, light cyan, magenta,
light magenta, and yellow. (There goes another light cyan.)
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One of the other things to be set and printed is of course an announcement which
I hope to get done before June. Meanwhile, if you are interested in the
title, do let us know - the edition will be of just ninety-five copies and only
sixty of those will be for sale. You can find details at our website - click on
the 'plans' button on the left when you get there. The prices there are still
indicative but in the right area. I don't anticipate an increase.
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