The iPad mini, released a few weeks ago, is the latest hand-held device to spark debate about the future of print and the publishing industry. Timely then, that the Society of Young Publishers chose the theme ‘Beyond the Book’ for their annual conference, held on 3 November at the London College of Communication. In a series of debates and seminars about interactive and social reading, self-publishing, and cross-media collaboration, the conference explored how digital technology is changing the face of the publishing industry.

The conference was largely attended by young publishing students and graduates just starting out in the industry. Newcomers to publishing, already a competitive market, are now faced with the extra – albeit exciting – challenge of trying to find a place in an industry that doesn’t quite know where it is heading. What is certain, however, is that digital technology will play a dominant part in its future. It is interesting then that in spite of all the forward-thinking sessions on offer at the conference, two of the most popular seminars (one organiser told me), were a print production workshop, which explored the relevance of the printing press in the digital age and invited participants to have a go on the college’s own printing press, and a talk I gave on ‘Beautiful Books’.

The latest e-readers are shinier, sleeker and sexier than ever before, but there is something undeniably alluring and romantic about the printed book. It is a tactile and private experience in a way that digital, interactive reading can never be. In the opening debate on the ‘game changers’ of the book publishing industry, it was posited that one of the challenges faced by digital publishing was matching the printed book’s success in making the ‘interface’ – the reader’s physical connection with print – disappear. Digital reading devices have lots to offer readers, but part of the magic of the reading experience is that you can lose yourself completely: a good book can engage you so entirely that you are no longer aware of its physical presence. This is difficult to replicate when you read from a piece of hardware that encourages interactive reading, clicking on images to animate them or links which allow you to jump from one passage to the next.

I found the discussion around ‘interface’ particularly intriguing, because at Folio, of course, the aim isn’t to make the reader’s awareness of the physical book disappear, but to celebrate it. My seminar looked at how fine books might fit in to publishing’s future. Readers can now get almost anything they want instantly on an e-reader, so when it comes to buying a physical book they’re looking for something more. Careful attention to typography, page design, paper and illustrations is becoming rare, and therefore more desirable and valued.

Our edition of The Handmaid’s Tale was particularly, and deservedly, admired by the seminar attendees

It’s fair to say that my audience was responsive, and eager to get their hands on the Folio books I’d brought with me – the lure of print in action. My favourite piece of feedback came from one young woman who stayed behind to chat to me about Folio: ‘Everything you said resonated with my soul!’ It’s comforting to know that, whatever the future of the book might be, the next generation of publishers are as in love with print as we are.

On 16 October 2012 Hilary Mantel won the Man Booker Prize – currently the most recognised literary prize in the English-speaking world – for the second time. This win, for Bring up the Bodies, made Mantel the first woman and the first British author to win it twice, as well as the first to win for a sequel to a novel which had previously won the Booker – Wolf Hall. I love statistics, however random.

Prizes are funny things. As Mantel accepted the honour (and cheque for £50,000) she commented that you can wait years to be awarded a Booker Prize and then two come along at once . It seems, though, that it’s not just Booker prizes that are in the news at the moment. This year saw the somewhat sensational announcement, a week prior to its awards ceremony at the end of May, that the Orange Prize (or to give it its old title, the Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction) would no longer be known as the Orange – or indeed any colour at all – as its sponsor had decided to concentrate on other projects. While those of us who adore symmetry were hoping that the Orange would be replaced by the Apple, it seems that there is to be a lull in the corporate sponsorship of what will next year be known by the somewhat stern and worthy title of the Women’s Prize for Fiction.

But at least with this appellation the prize will unambiguously be doing what it says on the tin. Two new prizes for women’s fiction have been launched in the last week, with intriguing if slightly confusing names: The Stella Prize, for a fiction or non-fiction work written by an Australian woman, and Canada’s Rosalind Prize, concentrating solely on women’s fiction. Even though it appears to be all chop and change in the book-awards world two aspects remain certain: the choice of whoever is finally the recipient of a major prize will, typically, only satisfy half the critics and reading public; and there certainly seems to be room for more high-profile awards of this nature. All in all this can only benefit those of us who love books.

I leave the last word on the subject to Lewis Carroll and his anarchic Caucus Race: ‘At last the Dodo said, “Everybody has won, and all must have prizes.”’

Fantastic news for us this autumn is that three Folio Society editions of The Handmaid’s Tale, Fahrenheit 451 and The Bhagavad Gita have been shortlisted in the Literature category of the British Book Design and Production Awards 2012.

It’s roughly a year since I was fortunate enough to work on each of these three striking Folio Society editions and so here is a ‘behind the scenes’ recall of my production experience on these books.

Typically I have two-three months to complete the production of a book – picking up the baton from my colleagues: the production manager, type designers, editors and art director – to control the ‘how it’s made’ bit and turn their digital files into physical books of bespoke Folio Society quality.

It sounds like a long time – but each Folio Society title, by its nature, is ‘high maintenance’, often requiring, as these three projects did, to have original illustrations and foil blocked bindings reproduced consistently across thousands of copies on what is ‘old technology’, the CMYK litho printing press.

So I used my time to conduct colour editing of the artist’s illustrations using a dedicated repro house: a delicate process that is required to adjust images so that when they are CMYK printed, the printed result is true to the artist’s original artwork.  Then to proof and proof again, checking every page of text, every illustration and every stage of the bindings and if necessary adjusting at plotter, and printed proof stages to achieve the highest quality.

Additionally, each artist is given an opportunity to comment on a final ‘wet’ proof of their illustrations, so they know exactly what their images will look like printed on the paper we have selected for them. I remember the delicate watercolour and gouache illustrations from The Bhagavad Gita artist Anna Bhushan, as works that were particularly difficult to reproduce on an uncoated paper.

All three of these books have that specialism unique to the Folio Society – the foil-blocked binding. The Bhagavad Gita however, had a binding design that pushed the technical boundaries – overprinting a gold foil in four colours, which caused much technical consultation with the production manager, the dedicated repro house and the printer. Finally, several proofs later, after testing a variety of foils and ink densities, I could sign off a stunning CMYK and sparkling gold-foiled artist illustrated cover proof.

Margaret Atwood with 'The Handmaid's Tale'

One or two moments added drama to my production task on The Handmaid’s Tale – jeopardising its delivery date. The cloth mill sold out of the shade selected for the cover (and of course nothing else would do), at the same time as the editor requested copies early to fly to Canada for Margaret Atwood to sign…

But, several signed books and a delighted author later, I can conclude that the joy of working in the ‘how its made’ department of a publishing company is that you have a physical product to show for your hard work (all the more poignant when you read Fahrenheit 451). And if it’s a Folio Society book it not only looks beautiful in its physical form but each of these three titles wears its unique production values in a way that adds great pleasure to the reading of a good work.

So fingers crossed, lets see what the judges think this November!

It is with great sadness that we learnt of the death last week of Noel Polk, Professor Emeritus in English literature at Mississippi State University. Over a long and illustrious academic career at MSU and, previously, the University of Southern Mississippi, Noel established himself as a leading authority on the American novel and in particular the Mississippi writers Eudora Welty and William Faulkner. He will be known to many Folio Society members as co-author of the companion volume to our recent limited edition of Faulkner’s novel The Sound and the Fury. For the Folio Society edition Noel and fellow Faulknerian Stephen M. Ross revised and updated their ground-breaking 1996 text Reading Faulkner: The Sound and the Fury. They also identified the different chronological layers in the first part of the novel, which Folio then printed in different-coloured inks, fulfilling a wish Faulkner himself had expressed to his agent.

When we first contacted Noel about our Faulkner project he was in the middle of a road trip around New York and New England, and gave a guardedly enthusiastic response – second-guessing Faulkner’s true intentions for his masterpiece would be a tricky undertaking. After a few days ‘gallivanting around’, which finally took him to Ohio for a baseball match, he agreed that it was indeed a very exciting proposition, and invited Stephen to renew their collaboration. They were to split the Folio Society commission, but Noel immediately emphasised that Stephen’s portion of the fee ‘won’t go as far as my half, because I suspect he drinks more expensive single malt than I do’. Noel, as it turned out, was himself a connoisseur of Fuller’s beer.

It was this easy charm and good humour, coupled with uncompromising rigour and erudition, that made working with Noel an entertaining and a humbling experience. He lived to see the publication of what has been one of Folio’s most successful limited editions, and for which we will always owe him and Steve a considerable debt of gratitude. It was a privilege to have known Noel for the last year of his life. The last word, however, should go to his friend Stephen M. Ross: ‘Noel, though only a year or so older than I am, was also my mentor as well as a co-author. He will be sorely missed.’

Several years ago I was fortunate enough to be invited to the unveiling of a plaque to honour Mary Shelley (author of Frankenstein and The Last Man), at 24 Chester Square, where she died in 1851. The Blue Plaque commemorative scheme, believed to be the oldest of its kind, began as far back as 1866 as a distinctive means of linking people who have made a significant contribution in their chosen field, to the places where they lived.

The area around the Folio offices in Holborn (or ‘east Bloomsbury’, as it is sometimes, more salubriously known!) in central London is awash with plaques, and we’d like to share a few of our favourites from here and further afield.

Crime-writer Dorothy L. Sayers had a long association with a flat to our east, at 24 Great James Street, where she lived in the 1920s while working as a copywriter and inventing her fictional detective Lord Peter Wimsey. Great James Street runs alongside Doughty Street which, as well as being home (at no. 48) to the Charles Dickens Museum, also boasts a plaque to pacifist and World War I memoirist Vera Brittain, author of Testament of Youth, who shared no. 52 with her friend Winifred Holtby (best known for her novel South Riding).

Rudyard Kipling, whose ‘If––’ is consistently voted Britain’s best-loved poem, has a plaque at 43 Villiers Street, between the Strand and Embankment; and Bertrand Russell, whose seminal work was A History of Western Philosophy, is remembered in Bury Place. Another famous peacemaker, one Mahatma Gandhi, studied law at University College in 1889, and during this period he lived at 20 Barons Court in west London.

Right on Folio’s doorstep, in Red Lion Square, is a plaque to John Harrison, inventor the marine chronometer and, most famously, the subject of Dava Sobel’s bestseller Longitude.

Ho Chi Minh is best remembered as the founder of modern Vietnam but, perhaps apocryphally, he is said to have worked as a pastry cook under the great Escoffier at the Carlton Hotel – it’s all there on the plaque on the Haymarket near Trafalgar Square.

And let’s not forget rock royalty: Jimi Hendrix was the first rock star to receive a blue plaque, at 23 Brook Street, Mayfair – happily adjacent to the plaque for another musical legend, George Frederick Handel, at no. 25. This year saw the fortieth anniversary of The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, the album that catapulted David Bowie to stardom, and the plaque to mark that historic recording is just round the corner at 10 Heddon Street. A modern Prometheus, indeed.

Recently, Observer Associate Editor (and occasional Folio contributor) Robert McCrum announced his list of some of the most memorable closing lines in literature. Here at The Folio Society, as one publishing year ends and another begins, we have come up with some of the opening lines which have most inspired or infuriated – from the wildly famous to the relatively obscure.

For some readers, ‘Call me Ishmael’ is as far as they get with Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick – which means missing out on one of the most sinewy, virtuoso pieces of literature ever written. There’s probably another blog covering the great unread works of all time (naturally I remain silent on my own omissions) but our survey of first lines ranges from the epic to the epigraphic. ‘I write this sitting in the kitchen sink,’ explains Cassandra Mortmain in Dodie Smith’s marvellous coming-of-age novel, I Capture the Castle, instantly plunging us into her chaotic family life. Jane Austen’s ‘It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife’ (Pride and Prejudice) brilliantly sets up her acutely reliable format of perceived attributes versus actual flaws, and L. P. Hartley’s The Go-Between rivals even Austen for one of the most-quoted first lines: ‘The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.’ Most poignantly, Peter Pan’s ‘All children, but one, grow up,’ seems enshrined in memories young and old.

As the first line is quite possibly the most significant of any in a book, I wonder how long Charlotte Brontë agonised over Jane Eyre’s ‘There was no possibility of taking a walk that day,’ or Ralph Ellison with his ‘I am an invisible man’ (Invisible Man). Sylvia Plath’s only novel, the autobiographical The Bell Jar, begins uncompromisingly with a real place, a real situation: ‘It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn’t know what I was doing in New York,’ whereas in Nineteen Eighty-Four George Orwell immediately lifts the lid on his skewed futuristic world: ‘It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.’ Obsessive love is unequivocally evident in ‘Fire of my loins!’, Nabokov’s considerably-more-than-a-paean to Lolita, while a passion for cultural destruction is declared in Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451: ‘It was a pleasure to burn.’

And finally (or should that be initially?) let’s turn to Don Quixote. All together now: ‘Somewhere in La Mancha, in a place whose name I do not care to remember…’

The US Marines have a saying ‘once a marine, always a marine’. The concept is so engrained that you never say ‘ex-marines’, but rather ‘former’ or ‘retired’. I have a feeling that The Folio Society works in rather the same way. Once a Folio member always a Folio member – even if you don’t happen to be buying books at the moment.

US Marine Insignia

Our Marketing Director, Toby, was sitting on a bench in Red Lion Square the other day eating his sandwich and reading a Folio book (without getting grease on the pages – fear not!), when he was approached by a lady. ‘Another Folio member!’ she said by way of introduction. She was surprised to find out The Folio Society was based just around the corner and lamented that since she wasn’t a current member she couldn’t drop by. Naturally Toby led her at once to the Member’s Room and told her to make herself at home. Once a Folio member, always a Folio member, you see. Anyway these days we don’t ban you from buying books if you’re not a member – we just don’t give you lovely discounts and gifts!

It works for employees too. Once a Folio member of staff, always a Folio member of staff. The idea is in my thoughts because after seven years at Folio, I am leaving. Indeed, it says a great deal about The Folio Society that seven years does not count as especially long service. There are numerous members of staff who have been here over 25 years, even more have reached the 10 year mark and been presented with a glass at the annual Christmas luncheon. Alas, this honour will not be mine – unless of course, like plenty of other members of staff I return one day. The more I think about life without limited editions to drool over, leather samples to stroke, exciting new artworks to look at and fascinating new subjects to learn about (burins, brayers and spitstickers, for example), the more I wonder how I can bear to go.

But I couldn’t stop being part of Folio, even if I wanted to. Lovingly acquired Folio books will continue to line my bookshelves. My husband will still curse every time he trips over the limited edition box, which is too large for the bookcase and lives on the floor. I won’t stop buttonholing strangers at parties and enthusing on the delights of Folio books… Nor, will I stop buying Folio books. In fact, I shall finally be eligible for a joining offer – now I just have to choose!

‘Dreams, myths, fairy tales, metamorphoses, the unruly unconscious, epic journeys, and a highly sensual celebration of sexuality in both its most joyous and darkest manifestations’ … Ian McEwan’s marvellous description of Angela Carter’s prose gives a fair idea why her masterpiece of fairy tale reinterpretation, The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories, was chosen as our ‘set book’ in the 2^nd annual Folio Society / House of Illustration Book Illustration Competition. What a starting point for any artist! You may have viewed our online gallery of the shortlisted illustrators – and last night (July 3) the overall winner was finally announced at the awards evening at the Collyer Bristow Gallery in Central London.

 After introductory remarks by House of Illustration Trustee Quentin Blake, our own Production Director Joe Whitlock Blundell spoke, and revealed that entries to this year’s competition had topped 500.  As last year’s winner Matthew Richardson has just been presented the prize for Book Cover Illustration at the V&A Illustration Awards for his work on The Outsider, the competition is already proving an effective springboard. Joe went on to praise all the shortlisted artists, and their pieces were then presented. The task of revealing the winner, however, was left to the Chair of the judging panel, author and expert on fairy and folk tale traditions, and introducer to our edition of The Bloody Chamber, Marina Warner.

Winner Igor Karash with Marina Warner and Joe Whitlock Blundell

 Igor Karash comes to Angela Carter’s fairy tales rather unexpectedly. Originally from Azerbaijan and now residing in St Louis, Missouri, he studied architecture and urban design, and his career path has led him into the field of retail architecture and graphics – not at first an obvious fit with Angela Carter’s sensual and baroque tales of wonder and terror.

'Out into the cold morning, harking after that black, vague shape, hapless fisherman for this sealed oyster with such a pearl in it' – Puss-in-Boots

 Igor, however, has always kept one foot in a more fanciful world, continuing to work on illustration projects in children’s publishing and in theatre set design. As Marina Warner said, it was Igor’s ability to create ‘an overall mood of mystery and pleasure’ in a series of illustrations that ‘conceal more than you can take in at first glance’. Perhaps most telling was that Igor restrained from using an obviously sensual red palette, applying a green tinge to each piece that ‘helps to lure us into this otherworld of mystery’.

The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories will be available to order from mid-August, but in the meantime, you can view Igor’s work, and that of the other shortlisted artists here. We are also preparing two new videos on the website– an interview with Marina Warner and with Igor Karash – we’ll let you know when they are available to view.

The Olympics is kicking off in London in a month’s time, and we are starting to gear up in Eagle Street – which mainly means considering alternative ways to get to work! Despite all the delightfully British grumbling over cost, design, architecture, website crashes and transport, I am rather pleased to see the whole event coming together. Arranging a party leaves me prostrate for a week, the thought of arranging the Olympics fills me with a certain kind of awe. Not content with organising 36 sports with 14,000 athletes from 205 countries, London 2012 also includes a Cultural Olympiad of over 12,000 events.

This is rather more my thing than sport. Although to be honest, the event I am most excited about is ‘Sacrilege’, a bouncy castle version of Stonehenge. I was also quite interested in a ‘What you Will’ performance in which 50 actors will fall into conversation with passers-by and give a Shakespeare speech. I can’t really hang around street corners, though, in the hope that a handsome young man will approach me to say ‘nymph, in thy orisons be all my sins remembered’.  Knowing my luck, I’d get Timon of Athens spitting insults at me – appropriately Olympic if one thinks about it.

Sacrilege in Glasgow

In fact, despite the trend for theatrical pop ups and street performance, tonight I am going to a Cultural Olympiad event comfortably seated in a theatre. Handspring Puppet Company (famous for the puppets in the National Theatre production of War Horse) is performing a show based around Ted Hughes’s Crow poems. These are – for my money – a better reflection of British poetic talent than the rather hastily knocked up musings on legacy and the East End that I’ve read from current poets.

Despite occasional bursts of cynicism, I really want to go to many of the events being put on. There’s The Owl and the Pussycat being performed along London’s canals in a production devised by Terry Jones of Monty Python fame. Due to my Patrick O’Brian obsession, I’m even secretly looking forward to the performance of ‘All the Bells’ in which all church bells and ships bells in the Royal Navy will be rung on 27th July.

If the thought of all this culture horrifies you, I think an extended holiday over the summer may be the only answer. It will probably be far easier to simply watch the sporting events on TV, without worrying about an actor popping up to quote Shakespeare to you as you try to make your way through the crowds in London.