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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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Now available
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It is almost
precisely three years ago that Anne Coon got in touch by e-mail asking whether I
would be interested in taking on a book of her poems and Kurt Feuerherm's
images. I dithered for some time about the idea. Although I liked the work,
reproducing colour images, especially those as intense as Kurt's, presented a
real problem. I had had two books done with offset-litho and the costs were
impossible to absorb and, although the work was well done, the results lacked
the edge I wanted.
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Anne had been prompted to get in touch having seen Jump of the Manta Ray
at the New York Public Library, where Carmen Boullosa, whose poetry it
publishes, gave a public reading and the book was on display. We had used (at
terrible expense) an Iris printer for the twenty large and thirty-or so small
images in that book. The results were indeed excellent but the logistics and the
costs made it something to think carefully about before taking committing to it.
I was also at the time struggling to see how I would deal with the seventy-two
illustrations (mostly watercolours) in The Bricks of Venice which I had
agreed to take on. I was looking very carefully at the state of ink-jet
technology, swotting up on digital colour management, and reading reviews on the internet of the alternative equipment that was available to the
studio printer, as opposed to the large commercial establishment. Anyway, to cut
a long story short, as soon as I discovered that mid-price inkjet printers were
able to offer brilliant quality, and archival quality at that, I took the
project on and agreed to do nine poems from Anne's longer cycle Via del
Paradiso together with the accompanying images by Kurt.
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So here we are three years later. About average really. The book had its first
'outing' at the Contemporary Craft Fair in Devon in June (see below) in the form
of a single display copy, and it took a
great many people's fancy. We sold the first copy (whilst it was still at the
binders) at the private view, so it was a good start. At the time, the colophon
sheets were still on their way back from New York to the binders here in the UK,
having been signed by Anne and Kurt.
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The zig-zag clearly needed a secure home, so I turned to Kojiro Ikegami's book
on Japanese bookbinding that I bought a few years ago, and decided that his
'four-sided case' would fit the bill. As you will see from the pictures at our
website (see below), the zig-zag nature of the binding means that the
traditional title page and colophon need to find a new home. Rather than being
at the ends of the book itself, here they are within the binding and are
revealed when the case is opened. Ikegami shows the case covered with some
wonderful-looking Japanese pattern papers, but in this instance I had to resist
the temptation to use something decorated so that the binding didn't have a
different 'voice' from Kurt's images, and we settled on a green cloth
throughout. The design also called for two bone clasps and for the edition I
needed 200. There seemed to be only a handful available in the UK, and I tracked
down a supplier in California who could send 180 immediately and the balance
after they had reordered from the Japanese makers. For a moment it felt
as though I had the entire world supply of kohase!
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Full details are now available at our
website, and if
you would like to go straight to some pictures of the book just click
here.
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Now that the binding has been done I can fix the price: £150 (Euro240, US$300). Of the
edition of 95 copies, only sixty are for sale and early orders have spoken for
half of those. In fact I have just had to send the sheets for the rest of the
edition to the binders (Brian Settle and his team at Woolnough Bookbinding) so
orders placed immediately will be delayed for a few weeks, but I shall deal with
orders in strict order of receipt.
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