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relating the early days of one of England's most collected early private presses | |
by David Chambers
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The type arrived from Harry McIntosh in June, as usual packaged up into plastic buckets. Given the delicate state of my back I asked him to load each with a little less type than usual this time round, so a dozen or so arrived, the delivery man getting shorter with each delivery. "What's in these? Lead?" Close. I made up all the type into pages over the following weeks and started printing at the end of the month. Everything went pretty much according to plan, with just a couple of close-disasters, all dutifully recorded at our website: click on the 'at work' button on the left of the home page, and then select the button for this book in the list. | ||
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One novelty on this book has been that we have included a couple of tip-ins of reproductions of early Daniel items, not in itself unusual but we printed them on a nineteenth-century parlour press known as a Ruthven after its Edinburgh inventor, John Ruthven. Henry Daniel's bibliographer, Falconer Madan, asserted that the Daniel family printed at home on a small Albion that Henry later took to Oxford, but his description of its unusual mechanism makes it certain that it was in fact a Ruthven, so it was entirely appropriate that we print the tip-ins from blocks on David's Ruthven. You can watch a short video of the press at work here. | ||
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I shall be sending out a paper prospectus this month, a bit later than expected. There will be 175 copies at £125 each. You can of course place an order now at our website: use the 'order' button on the left of the home page. If you are a Subscriber you will receive your copy in November at the usual 15% discount. (Unfortunately for logistical reasons it has not been possible to offer ad personam copies as we had hoped.) | ||
