Just back from the Prints and Drawings department at the British Museum, where we were looking at one of their great treasures, the unique volume of original Goya etchings for Los Desastres de la Guerra printed by the artist himself and bound for presentation to his friend Ceán Bermúdez. For political reasons the first edition was not published until 1863, long after Goya’s death, and the plates in it were considerably altered, so the BM copy is the only record we have of the artist’s intentions. These are among the most graphic and visceral depictions of war ever made, and we are hoping to publish a facsimile of them next year, the bicentenary of the ending of the Peninsular War. Here are two of the 85 plates: the pencil captions were written by Goya himself, who also wrote his name on the page edges – which we intend to reproduce.

Mentions in this blog of the forthcoming Fifty Fables of La Fontaine illustrated by Quentin Blake have stirred up considerable interest, and several members have asked if they can reserve a copy. This is indeed possible, but not via a comment on the blog. Should you wish to do so, please contact our Limited Editions team directly via this e-mail address: limitededitions@foliosociety.com. This is perhaps an appropriate moment to point out that this blog is intended as an informal ramble through the content of our Limited Edition projects, and does not treat of such practical matters as prices and publication dates – all of which will be announced in due course via mailings and our website. Indeed, the fact that I mention a project does not even mean that we will certainly publish it: some fall by the wayside, alas.

Having said which, this next project will most certainly be published, barring accidents. I had a visit the other day from Michael Williamson, chairman of The Trollope Society, who had an extraordinary tale to tell about The Duke’s Children, the final volume of Trollope’s ‘political’ (or Palliser) novels, and widely regarded as one of his finest. It had always struck me as odd that The Duke’s Children is considerably shorter than the other novels in the series. Michael explained that as originally written it was indeed as long as the others, and contained additional threads of plot which tied up the narratives of the earlier books; but the wretched publishers, faced with declining sales, insisted that he cut the book to three-quarters of the length. Trollope reluctantly did so, and pruned the book so carefully that no one would suspect that a quarter of it was missing. Fortunately the original manuscript survives in the Beinecke Library at Yale. Amazingly it has never been published, and Michael has offered us the chance to do so – happily coinciding with Trollope’s bicentenary in 2015. I am now taking great pleasure in re-reading the five preceding political novels, so as to be primed for reading the restored final volume as soon as the text is available. This print is of the castle of Crummie-Toddie, which features in the novel, and gives a clue to the illustration style we plan to adopt.

Back to La Fontaine, I was delighted to hear that Sarah Bakewell has agreed to write an introduction to our edition. I found her book How to Live: A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer utterly inspirational and can warmly recommend it even to those who – like myself – have never read Montaigne. And here, to finish with, is a lately arrived rat from the QB studio.

Rather a hiatus in blogging of late, not because there has been a lack of interesting activity, rather because there has been too much. I did get as far as starting a Yule blog, featuring this lovely wall painting of the Nativity in the church at Malancrav, in Transylvania, where we went last summer. I particularly like the rather naughty expressions of the ox and ass.

Now even the New Year is becoming a distant memory. It was very exciting to see that the Queen’s honours list included a knighthood for Quentin Blake. There were parties aplenty for Quentin’s 80^th birthday last month, but not a word was whispered of this impending glory. Not that this distracted him from his work, and he duly delivered the artwork for The Fables of La Fontaine punctual to the day.  There are over 50 illustrations, and the way he has varied the rhythm – full-colour plates are interspersed with less formal images with restricted colour palettes – is a joy.

We have been forging ahead with trials on the William Morris manuscript of Horace’s Odes, which have been fraught with difficultly due to the incredible intricacy of his original work, and in particular the wide variety of gold and silver tooling Morris employed. The binding is also particularly tricky, with handsome leather doublures – I doubt whether this attractive hand-binding technique has ever been attempted on an edition of this size, and the prospect is somewhat daunting.

However the really hectic activity has been around Van Gogh’s sketchbooks. With over 300 separate images to reproduce, numerous visits to check the proofs against the originals in Amsterdam have been required. Meanwhile the curators at the Van Gogh Museum have been working round the clock to produce a commentary on every single sketch (and even every single smudge). We are working flat out to have the facsimiles ready for the re-opening of the Museum on 1 May 2013. The trial solander box arrived yesterday, together with a proof of the limitation certificate, printed letterpress.

I have just heard from Hereford that our reproduction of the Mappa Mundi is now on display in the South East Transept of the Cathedral, housed in the 1948 display case originally constructed for the medieval map itself by the Royal Geographical Society. The recent refurbishment of the case has added smart new oak panelled doors and down lights, allowing an impressive display of the Folio Society map when the original cannot be viewed.

We have started trials on two major new Limited Editions, which if all goes well, will appear in the next year or so. One is a set of facsimiles of all Van Gogh’s surviving sketchbooks held at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, which we hope to publish next year in collaboration with that institution. There are four sketchbooks plus a number of loose pages, all kept in a handsome box lined in marble paper, and they form a fascinating insight into his working practices. The museum is closed for refurbishment at present, so Kate (our Production Manager for Limited Editions), Phil (from Dot Gradations, the repro house that handles all our trickiest work) and myself were whisked off in a taxi to an anonymous warehouse in the suburbs of Amsterdam where the works are in temporary storage. Somehow the workaday surroundings increased the frisson of handling these fragile objects. The sketches were clearly not produced with posterity in mind – scribbles and jottings are interspersed with relatively finished drawings. Here are two examples – one a portrait of an unknown sitter, the other an early sketch for an extremely well known painting.

The other new project is also very fragile and priceless, a manuscript of Horace’s Odes, written and illuminated by William Morris, which Neil – our Managing Editor with particular involvement in Limited Edition projects – spotted in the catalogue of the Bodleian Library. It is a small jewel-like book and the intricacy of the gilding is quite breath-taking – and fiendishly hard to replicate in facsimile. Here is a particularly lovely page, which certainly bears the influence of Burne-Jones, who quite possibly contributed the delicate portraits.

We had an eventful afternoon last Tuesday, when David Attenborough came into the office to record interviews with the BBC and Guardian about our new book of Birds drawn by Edward Lear for John Gould. Film crews and stills photographers with all their sundry equipment were on hand to record his precious words. A few days earlier, he signed all the limitation certificates for the book.

We have now sold out of our edition of The Sound and the Fury, with two of the last copies going to Martin Scorsese – a long-standing fan of Folio books, and Francis Ford Coppola.

I am delighted that Christopher Frayling has agreed to be a guest judge in our next Book Illustration Competition. He is illustrious in many fields, so much so that he is be-knighted, with the brilliant motto PERGE SCELUS MIHI DIEM PERFICIAS, a loose translation of the Clint Eastwood line ‘Go ahead, punk – make my day’. Among his many books, Frayling has written one of the most unrepentantly civilised that I have read in a long time. Its subject is the tragic demise of Horace Walpole’s cat Selima, the poem by Gray it inspired, and the three sets of illustrations produced for that poem by Richard Bentley, William Blake and Kathleen Hale. But this is just the starting point for a delightful meander through the literary and artistic world of the 18^th century. As it happens, we will be publishing a new facsimile of all Blake’s illustrations to Gray next year – here is his opening for Ode on the Death of a Favourite Cat.

Last week I went to press pass Edward Lear’s Birds at the printers Appl, in the lovely Bavarian village of Wemding. The printer was a Herr Vogel, which occasioned much innocent merriment.

Then back to London, where the leather-bound dummy finally appeared – we have been working on it for six months or so, devising methods of replicating old methods and materials with what we have available. Not perfect yet, but it will be.

Meanwhile, Niroot has been making progress (slow progress indeed, not surprisingly) with his paintings for the Just So Stories. Here are three stages in the evolution of his Whale, with the Mariner, who was a man of infinite-resource-and-sagacity, stepping out on the shingle.

I have heard a variety of apologies from printers over the years, but this one – from Christopher Bacon, who is printing Niroot’s etching for Just So Stories – is a new one. ‘Sorry to have missed your call this morning, but had to take a sick hedgehog to hospital…’ No doubt it was a Stickly-Prickly Hedgehog, though not from the banks of the turbid Amazon.

Still on the subject of Just So Stories, we have received an excellent introduction from Michael Morpurgo. I worked with Michael on one of his first books, All Around the Year, more than 30 years ago, which led to the undoubted high spot of my literary career – playing darts with Ted Hughes in a Devon pub.

We are at last beginning to see the end of an extraordinary journey – the Letterpress Shakespeare. Someone spotted that Shakespeare’s 450^th birthday is 23 April 2014, which seems an appropriate date for us to conclude this huge undertaking. No doubt there will be great bardolatrous revelries on that day, and even more a couple of years later, which will be the 500^th anniversary of his death.

Now I’m off with my family for a couple of weeks in Transylvania, where I’m assured we will have a fangtastic time. (Ouch!)

Historically my public speaking engagements have been noted for their rarity, but there has been a string of them in the past few weeks – my excuse for being so slow with this blog entry. First was a talk to the Friends of the Cathedral Library in Hereford, on the subject of how facsimiles are made. The talk coincided with an exhibition of Folio facsimiles at the Library which was an enormous help, since I was able to illustrate my points with the books themselves, and of course the Mappa Mundi in particular. The exhibition was loaned by Margaret Flint, one of our most dedicated collectors – it was extremely generous of her to put her precious copies on display and thus share her pleasure in them with others.

The following week, the Japan Foundation invited us to launch our limited edition of Japan, described and illustrated by the Japanese, at their London headquarters. The main speaker was Sebastian Dobson, a specialist in the history of photography in Japan, who gave a fascinating account of the story behind this remarkable book. For my part, I related some of the unusual problems we had encountered along the way, such as the big differences in colouring between one copy and the other. I also drew attention to one of the less celebrated but interesting features of the book, the pictorial initial capitals which start every chapter.  Here for example are three variant Ts.

A prize-giving evening for the second annual Book Illustration Competition took place last week. Quentin Blake kicked off the proceedings with an account of the activities of House of Illustration, our partners in the event. I said my bit about the judging, then the main speaker was Marina Warner, who was extremely eloquent about Angela Carter’s work, and in particular The Bloody Chamber which was the competition set book. Then she presented the prizes, culminating with a bottle of champagne for the winner Igor Karash – whose illustrations will now be published in The Folio Society edition of the book. I really enjoyed the evening – veterans such as David Gentleman, Quentin and John Vernon Lord rubbing shoulders with eager students still at art college.

Last of these public appearances was a couple of nights ago, when we launched the Leaves from a Psalter by William de Brailes at the home of the original leaves, the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge. As well as brief speeches and Q&A we showed the short film we’d made about the facsimile – which you can see here. We displayed a set of framed copies of the facsimile, and it was gratifying to overhear more than one member refer to them as the originals.

So I’ve had my fill of public speaking for the time being, and its good to get back to ‘real’ work. Here are some of the lovely tailpieces for Just so Stories which Niroot dropped in the other day.

My request for information on books printed with coloured text has unearthed several others. Here is a complete (I hope) list of those suggested to date:

The Never Ending Story by Michael Ende
House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski
The Dictionary of the Khazars: a lexicon novel by Milorad Pavic (Spanish Edition)
Purple and Black by KJ Parker
Sacre Bleu by Christopher Moore
Gould’s Book of Fish by Richard Flanagan
The Bible – with Jesus’s words printed in red

I feel an idiosyncratic little collection in the offing.

Finally, belated congratulations to Peter Barber, Map Librarian at the British Library, and the moving spirit behind several of our Limited Editions, who was awarded the OBE in the Queen’s Jubilee Honours List.

Last night I went to Flowers Gallery in Kingsland Road to celebrate Tom Phillips 75^th Birthday. It was a magnificent dinner, attended by many luminaries of the art, literature and media worlds, with an exhibition of Tom’s latest paintings on the walls, which is highly recommended. There were speeches by Stephen Fry, Angela Flowers and the artist himself, which was greeted with immense warmth, showing just how much Tom and his work are loved and respected.

The first hand-bound copies of The Sound and the Fury have just come in and I have to say they look tremendous: the binding is fresh and modern and the coloured text looks really enticing. In my letter describing the book I said I was unaware of any other book printed in different colours in this way. One member has already put me right in this respect, citing Michael Ende’s The Never Ending Story (though it is a mere two colours, as opposed to 14 for our Faulkner) – and I’d be interested to hear of any others. A trial panel for the slipcase spine also came in today, and is included in the photo.

Last week I went to Düsseldorf for Drupa, the world’s biggest printing equipment fair. The array of machinery on display was quite staggering, particularly the new digital presses. Some of these have a million ink-jet nozzles and are making literally billions of actions per second – this was too much for a bear of little brain to cope with and I was relieved to find someone printing on a press which Gutenberg would have been familiar with.

I’m told that Hewlett Packard spent not much short of €25 million on their display, but some outfits were more modest in their promotion.

Jemma Lewis, who creates hand marbled papers for us, has just sent in samples of four possible designs for the binding of Travels in Arabia Deserta, inspired by Bedouin fabrics and desert dunes – it will be hard to choose between them.

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.