Met David Way of the British Library for a drink last night. He was enthusing about the BL’s acquisition of the St Cuthbert Gospel. This manuscript of St John’s Gospel was buried with Cuthbert and later retrieved from his coffin, and is the oldest intact book in the Western world. There is an exhibition dedicated to the book in The Folio Society Gallery at the BL and the original book can be seen in their Treasures gallery. Now there is talk of a facsimile . . .

Earlier in the day, we held an extraordinary meeting here at Folio to discuss the binding of our forthcoming facsimile of Edward Lear’s complete bird drawings for John Gould – mentioned in this blog on 2 November last year. The original binding of this very large book is a magnificent affair, with full leather boards intricately tooled, hand marbled endpapers, etc, and we were trying to establish whether it was remotely possible to replicate it today. Present at the meeting were representatives of all the different crafts involved – leather tanning, gold blocking, binding, hand marbling and reprographics, and they all had an immense amount to contribute. We learnt, for instance, about the problems of leather produced in the 1840s, when the traditional but incredibly slow, tanning methods of the 18^th Century, using oak bark, had been superseded by the use of an extract from the Quebracho tree in South America. We learnt that the marbling style employed was the ‘Turkish’ or ‘spot’ – a popular style of the period. We discussed the details of the processes which would enable such large pieces of leather to be drawn on cases and retain precise alignment of the filigree blocking – well we hope so anyway!

I also had a visit from Emily Brett, the daughter of Simon Brett, the doyen of British wood engravers, who has produced so many brilliant illustrations for us over the last 25 years. He is planning a major retrospective exhibition next year to mark his 70^th birthday and Emily had come to talk about the catalogue, in which his Folio work will play a major part.

Martin Morgan, the highly idiosyncratic publisher of Extraordinary Editions, called in to show me some of his books. These include a Survey of the Channel Islands, created for King Charles II in 1680, and the facsimile of a medieval manual of swordsmanship in which a scholar is instructed in the art of fighting with sword and buckler by a priest. The book I was most struck by was a fine reproduction of the SAS War Diary 1941–1945, a private history of the legendary early years of that regiment. Martin has published this in a range of different editions, including ‘The Originals Edition’ presented in a sand-blasted replica ammunition box which ingeniously converts into a lectern.

David Eccles has been hand numbering all the limitation certificates for the Leaves from a Psalter by William de Brailes, and I filmed him in the act, for use in a promotional video showing some of the production processes of this unique publication. Here is a sneak preview of David at work.

Today is the centenary of Captain Scott’s last journal entry, and therefore in all probability of his death. To mark the occasion a service was held in St Paul’s cathedral, from which I have just returned. It was a magnificent affair, with powerful singing (including ‘Onward Christian Soldiers’, Scott’s favourite hymn) and moving readings – David Attenborough read the final Message from Scott’s Journal and Falcon Scott, grandson of the explorer, read the passage from Tennyson’s Ulysses which culminates in the words ‘to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield’, which were inscribed by Cherry-Garrard on the memorial cross on the edge of the Beardmore Glacier. A lone piper from Captain Oates’s regiment accompanied the placing of a wreath by the Scott memorial plaque.

© The Fitzwilliam Museum, 2012

A letter came in from one of our members last week extolling the beauties of The Metz Pontifical – a manuscript dating from around 1310 belonging to The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge – and suggesting we publish it in facsimile. A single, top-class artist worked on the illuminations, but it seems that he ran out of time because in the last few pages the illustrations are drawn but not coloured or gilded, thus giving a fascinating insight into the creative process. The first image here shows a spread from the completed part of the book, while the other two pages in varying states of completion. The script is also extremely fine.

© The Fitzwilliam Museum, 2012

I spent an afternoon with Quentin Blake planning his new book, The Fables of La Fontaine. Fifty fables will be included, all of them illustrated, mostly full page and in colour. Quentin has been busy with preliminary pen-and-ink sketches – here are a few of them.

One of the most successful titles in our current programme has been Selected Poems and Prose by Gerard Manley Hopkins, which was beautifully illustrated with paintings by Elizabeth Magill. Now Elizabeth has reworked the cover image ‘Blue Hold’ as a nine-colour lithograph which is being published by Manifold Editions in an edition of 75 copies. The full price is £900 but the publishers have kindly agreed to make the print available to our members at the special pre-publication price of £750. For full details, please click here.

Doughty’s Travels in Arabia Deserta is one of the undisputed classics of travel literature, yet has never appeared in a photographically illustrated edition. Doughty was no photographer, but enquiries at Harvard have revealed a rich collection of largely unpublished photographs many of which are almost contemporary with Doughty and cover significant parts of his route.  Here, for instance, is Doughty’s description of Mount Hermon: ‘There arose the high train of Hermon aloft before us, hoar-headed with the first snows and as it were a white cloud hanging in the element,’ and here is a contemporary photograph by F. M. Good. The other photo, of a Bedouin encampment at Jericho, is by Félix Bonfils.

Further to my note on Leonard Rosoman, it has been brought to my attention that he had a walk-on part in another Folio Book, in his capacity as fireman during the blitz. London, Portrait of a City, published in 1998, contains an extract from William Samson’s short story, ‘The Wall’, based on a true incident in which two firemen were killed by a collapsing wall, while two others, standing right by them, were unharmed. The fortunate pair were William Sansom himself and ‘Len’ – who was in fact Leonard Rosoman. Here is Leonard’s painting of the event.

Leonard Rosoman 1913–2012

Leonard Rosoman, who died a few days ago aged 98, was one of the most distinguished artists to illustrate for Folio. In addition to book illustration, he was a painter, printmaker, teacher (David Hockney was one of his pupils) a Royal Academician and an official war artist during the Second World War. Leonard’s first book for us was Aldous Huxley’s Point Counter Point in 1958 and this was followed by Brave New World in 1971, which stands out from the books of that period with the futuristic style of its typography and binding design as well as its striking illustrations.

I first got to know Leonard when we commissioned illustrations to Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks in 1989, and this was followed by Brideshead Revisited in 1995 and The Magic Mountain in 2000. The latter two books were in colour, and exemplify Leonard’s distinctive palette, dominated by shades of yellow and green.

Although he was an old man by the time I came to know him, he resolutely refused to act his age, and he retained the chirpy enthusiasm of a college-leaver to the end of his days. Each commission was given the same serious attention as though it were his first – when he took on Brideshead Revisited at the age of 87, he rushed off to Yorkshire with his sketch pad to draw Castle Howard – working from a photograph would have been unthinkable to him. Hard to think that he was old enough to have experienced English country house life before the War, and had also served as a war artist, which made him uniquely well equipped to illustrate Waugh’s masterpiece.

The South Polar Times has been published at long last! It is five years since I first saw the originals, and over two years since we started working on it in earnest, but we still went to the wire – the books were delivered on January 17^th, one hundred years to the day since Scott and his companions finally reached the South Pole. The publication is causing quite a stir – the New York Times has already run an article about it, and the Observer and The Times are also planning features. We have donated a copy to the ship’s library of the Orion, which runs tours to the Antarctic, and to the Explorer’s Club in New York for a charity auction, as well as to the three British institutions where the originals are housed – the Royal Geographical Society, the British Library and the Scott Polar Research Institute.

Mezzotints by John Martin for 'Paradise Lost'

Talking of the British Library, I was there the other day looking at John Martin’s illustrations to Paradise Lost. He produced two different sets of mezzotints for the poem, one for the quarto and one for the octavo edition of the book, and as you can see even in this rather shaky iPad photo there are significant differences between the two. Mezzotints are extremely hard to reproduce – the shadow detail tends to get lost when they are photographed – so I am on the lookout for an unbound set of the prints (either format) from which we could scan direct, and thus achieve a quality worthy of the originals. If anyone knows of such a set, do let
me know.

Niroot Puttapipat came in the other day with the binding artwork for his next book. There are four blocking passes (copper, silver, gold and black) on a tan material. The separations are things of beauty – here they all are. No prizes for guess which book he’s working on!

Gold (left) and Black (right)

Copper (left) and Silver (right)

I found a new use for the iPad the other day. I was at the Yale Centre for British Art, checking the proofs of William Blake’s illustrations to the poems of Thomas Gray against the watercolour originals, and they weren’t looking too good, so I brought the iPad camera into action:                   As you can see from this example, the proof (on the left) is distinctly ‘warmer’ than the original. Being able to photograph the two side by side in the same lighting conditions, and email the result to the repro house, is an immense help in getting the colour right. I try and avoid superlatives in this blog, but I have to say that handling over a hundred original watercolours by Blake is pretty exciting!

The dummy copy of Poems of Thomas Gray has recently come in from the binders, designed by David Eccles as a companion to Night Thoughts which we published a few years ago.

David is also working on lettering for the presentation box of the Vellum Leaves by William de Brailes. He has based it on de Brailes’ own inscription within one of the illuminations – these letters are less than 2mm high so it requires a magnifying glass and lots of patience to copy them. Here is de Brailes’ original, hugely enlarged, together with David’s version.

After my visit to Yale I went to New York for meetings at various august institutions, sounding them out about the possibility of holding special events for our East coast members. The Morgan Library (who possess one of the de Brailes leaves) and The Grolier Club were both extremely welcoming and receptive to our ideas. Most intriguing was The Explorers Club, where we hope to hold an event to celebrate the South Polar Times. It is a magnificent building, with all the accoutrements one would hope for in such an institution, from solar topees to huge elephant tusks and a stuffed polar bear.

On my flights to and from New York I was engrossed by Steven Pinker’s latest book The Better Angels of Our Nature, a fascinating analysis of the gradual decline of violence over the history of mankind. His accounts of medieval tortures and executions are grimly fascinating, and it was serendipitous that my last call in New York was at the Richard Feigen gallery, where Sam Fogg is showing some remarkable Northern European late medieval paintings, some of which rejoice in their depictions of unimaginable suffering. Here is a torturer from one of the paintings, who bears an uncanny resemblance to Mr Bean.

Finally a word about a fund-raising initiative from House of Illustration, our partners in the annual Book Illustration Competition. Please click here to support their excellent cause.

Finally, finally, Quentin Blake has been awarded this year’s Prince Philip Designers Prize, to add to his amazing collection of honours. Is there any other appropriate award he has not won?

Yesterday evening I went to the opening of the Royal Manuscripts exhibition at the British Library. We all had to arrive early for security reasons, but fortunately there was no shortage of champagne, so we had a jolly time waiting for the Queen and Prince Philip to arrive. In due course, Her Majesty declared the exhibition open and then we could go down and take a look. There are almost 200 fabulous manuscripts on show, all from the British Library’s own collection: every one is a treasure, and most are rarely on view, so it’s unmissable. I was mesmerised by this image of   ‘God Creating Heaven and Earth’: one tends to think of God the Father as an angry old man, but here I feel he embodies all of the trinity in one – so the suffering in his face is a premonition of his own suffering on the cross.

Last weekend I went to Oxford for the Fine Press Book Fair. As ever, there was a tempting array of goodies on offer from both sides of the Atlantic. I was very taken by Walter Bachinski’s new Circus Book, and also by a remarkable collection of type specimens all designed and printed by the self confessed ‘Alphabetical Fetishist’, Russell Maret. I was sorely tempted by both, and finally fell for the latter – of course lo-res images on screen cannot begin to do justice to this superb letterpress printing, but that’s precisely the reason why work of this kind should be possessed in physical form.

One of the most enjoyable tasks this week has been type-setting the text of Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury in an array of different colours, so as to assist the reader in following the different strands of the narrative. The narrator of the first section of the book is Benjy, the idiot alluded to in the book’s title; in this page, for example, his ‘present day’ narrative which resumes towards the foot of the page, is printed in black, while the green and brown passages form part of his memories of two different days in childhood, about twenty years earlier. This is a notoriously tough novel to read, and I’ve found that this approach to the text – which was wished for by Faulkner himself, but never before realised in print – is enormously helpful to one’s understanding it.

Some days are more bloggable than others, and yesterday was a bumper day.  In the morning, I went to the Kensington home of Lisa von Clemm, doyenne of the Designer Bookbinders, to take part in judging their annual competition. Each year The Folio Society donates printed sheets of a set book to be bound by all the entrants. This year it was Bruce Chatwin’s Songlines, illustrated by Simon Pemberton. I’m not allowed to tell you who won but here is a selection from the 50 or so entries. In addition to the Folio set book, entrants can also submit a book of their choice, here are a few that caught my eye. The middle one is called Nest and Egg.

After lunch I went to visit David Attenborough to discuss a new project. David spent over a decade tracking down every plate drawn by Edward Lear for the various bird books published by John Gould. There are 70 plates altogether, and once the collection was complete, he had them bound in an original Gould binding case. Lear was in a class of his own among the bird painters of the day: here is one magnificent example, the Eagle Owl.  We are hoping to publish a facsimile of this unique volume in a year or so, including a new essay by DA himself.

David also told me some of his experiences when making his current TV series Frozen Planet, including his visit to Scott’s hut, which remains just as it was left in 1913. He approached and entered it entirely alone, and felt the tangible presence of the spirits of the past – ‘if ever I were to believe in ghosts, it was at that moment!’ I told him about the forthcoming publication of South Polar Times and he said he could not wait to see it.

In the evening I went to see the premiere of a new opera at Covent Garden’s Linbury Studio Theatre, Conrad’s Heart of Darkness composed by Tarik O’Regan with a libretto by Tom Phillips. The intensity and moral complexity of the story were brilliantly recreated in the operatic medium – do try and get to see it.

Finally, talking of seeing things, there are two interesting shows on in London at the moment for the lovers of illustrated books. John Vernon Lord has an exhibition of his work for Alice Through the Looking Glass at The Illustration Cupboard until 5 November; while at Sophie Schneideman Rare Books the great American engraver and book artist Gaylord Schanilec has an exhibition until December 3.

I am delighted that John Holder has received the rare accolade of an honorary doctorate from Anglia Ruskin University. John has illustrated some great Folio books over the years (including the Hippopotamus shown here), and is a fine musician to boot.

Here’s a moody picture of the artist.  The citation describes him as:

‘a veteran illustrator who is known internationally for his phenomenal creative talent.  He specialises in classic pen drawing with a generous twist of humour and these intricate, expressive and evocative drawings have been acclaimed by art critics from every corner of the globe.’

In an earlier post I mentioned that we were working on a complete facsimile of South Polar Times, the in-house magazine of Captain Scott’s Antarctic expeditions. Devising a suitable box has been quite a challenge: it has to hold the twelve books in an upright position and protect them from damage, and we have tried to find which evokes the style and materials available to the expedition. After a few prototypes, we came up with this one, in rough canvas.  There’s a lot of interest building up around this publication, which will appear early next year in what promises to be a blizzard of activity around Scott’s centenary, centred on a big exhibition at the Natural History Museum.

Last week was the Frankfurt Book Fair, at which we have had a stand for the past three years.  It gives a rare opportunity to chat with some of our German members, whose enthusiasm for Folio and for British culture in general is inspiring.  The main reason I go to Frankfurt is to meet with some of the European facsimile publishers, and look at each other’s latest offerings.  Here is one of the most elaborate bindings I came across this year. It is for a manuscript known as the Speyer Pericopes, and is constructed from various metals – the central figure is gilded – and numerous gems. The book is selling for around €20,000.  (If anyone would like to know more, just let me know, and I’ll put them in touch with the publishers.)

Red letter day. The final proofs of the Vellum Leaves by William de Brailes arrived from Italy. Everyone who sees them says – these are amazing, they’re like real vellum! Yes, because they are real vellum. I’ll be taking them to the Frankfurt Book Fair next week, and look forward to some jaw-dropping reactions from the other facsimile publishers.

Meanwhile, I have finally finished positioning the type and photographs in the Japan books. These are a great record of Japanese culture just over a century ago, to all appearances totally unaffected by the West. Here are a couple of pictures that amused me – the postman, and farmers in their raincoats.

And, on a more serious note, here is the result of an earthquake in 1891, in which 10,000 people were killed and 20,000 wounded. The caption laconically observes: ‘Earthquakes . . . are feared by everyone except the newly arrived tourist, who seems to enjoy the novelty of the situation.’ Plus ça change!

A recurrent problem for books where the photographs and text must be printed on the same paper is finding a stock that suits both – if the paper is chosen to suit the text, the photos tend to look muddy, and if the paper suits the photos, the text area tends to be glaring and unsympathetic. We have sourced a new type of paper that we think will do the trick for this book. Here is a reduced size image of our test proofing document – at the top are two of the standard pages, with different background shades; below them are one of the large photographs and an art print, ‘mounted’ onto coloured papers; at the bottom of the sheets are strips of all the different shades we will be employing for the mounts; finally there are a couple of lines of text newly typeset by us, alongside the original version, for comparison, printed on a further selection of backgrounds.

We have been checking these colour proofs at the John Rylands Library in Manchester. Here is a photo of their magnificent reading room.