Letters from Lockdown

Charles had paid us a visit in London to discuss how we might turn this charming edition into a Folio book. This would involve Charles creating new artwork for the binding design and additional illustrations for the inside pages as well as for a limited edition. It was a very enjoyable meeting and we parted confident that with new artwork arriving in the spring, we had plenty of time to produce the Folio editions for Christmas 2020.

By the time the first artwork arrived at the end of March, the UK had entered ‘lockdown’. I had placed the printing and binding with Italian specialist binders Graphicom, based in Vicenza, close to the area then most affected by Covid-19. As they were enduring even tougher restrictions than the UK - Valentina, our account controller, was only allowed 100m from her front door and only a skeleton staff were at the factory - product development was painfully slow. To help, I made an early decision to source only Italian materials: the Modigliani text paper from Cordenons (Turin), coloured papers from Fedrigoni (Verona) and the gold cloth for the limited edition from Manifattura del Seveso (Bergamo).

The first cover proof for the limited edition wasn’t quite right: pale blue and jade blue foils were chosen but they were too close in colour. A mint green foil was substituted for the jade foil, which gave a much better result, differentiating the flower petals from the leaves in Charles’s artwork.