With every poem perfectly reproduced from the finest surviving copy of William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and of Experience, this Folio collector’s edition is introduced by Patti Smith.
Spring
A Folio Anthology
Illustrated by Petra Börner
Preface by Paul Evans
Edited by Sue Bradbury
A unique collection of poetry and prose, beautifully bound and illustrated with newly commissioned artwork.
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Fleeting but full of emerging life, spring brings the promise of sunny days and the sweeping away of winter blues. More delicate than summer and yet equally intense, it has moved many writers to words of praise. This generously illustrated collection of poetry and prose is by turns affectionate, humorous and elegiac, with work by George Orwell, Rachel Carson, Captain Scott and more.
In a passage from The Wind in the Willows, Mole spring-cleans his house before scrambling above ground to roll in ’the warm grass of a great meadow’. Anton Chekhov is in awe of the River Goltva’s ’rampant spring waters’ and a world ’lit by stars, bestrewing every corner of the sky’. Coleridge writes of birds rejoicing, their song no longer subdued by winter, while his friend Wordsworth meditates on the passage of time in his famous ’Ode: Intimations of Immortality’.
These extracts and many more are decorated with gorgeous colour illustrations by Petra Börner, the Swedish-born artist whose work appears across our seasonal anthologies. As well as two lush colour spreads, there are charming tailpieces depicting flora and fauna. Börner also created the book’s elegant binding design.
Writer and broadcaster Paul Evans provides a thoughtful preface. He remembers marvelling at a manuscript of Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, illuminated with stems and leaves. Nature’s power to inspire is all the more poignant, he says, when we note that a manmade ’facsimile’ threatens increasingly to take its place. These timeless extracts, celebrating the earth’s natural rhythms, are ’literary narcotic jolts of Spring to last us until the next’.
Production Details
Quarter-bound in cloth with printed Modigliani paper sides
Set in Caslon
96 pages
Frontispiece, 4 colour double-page spreads and 14 tailpieces
Please note this title is not slipcased
8¾˝ x 5½˝
A rich collection
Spring. The garden. Peach-trees
Fabulously red.
A path between them where a girl,
As through a flower-bed,
Wades in the lane’s reflection
Of the flowers overhead.
Otomo no Yakamochi (718–85), translated by Graeme Wilson.
About Sue Bradbury
Sue Bradbury became Editorial Director of The Folio Society in 1984, a position she held for twenty-five years. Her own publications include a translation of Three Tragedies by Federico García Lorca, Midnight Madonna (1995), a novel set in the Spanish Civil War, the biography Joanna, George and Henry: A Pre-Raphaelite Tale of Art, Love and Friendship(2012), and she also collaborated with Robert Fox on his magisterial four-volume Eyewitness to History for The Folio Society. She was awarded the OBE in 2010 for services to the publishing industry.
About Paul Evans
Paul Evans is a writer, broadcaster, senior lecturer in creative writing at Manchester Metropolitan University and award-winning playwright, be known for his ‘Country Diary’ in The Guardian newspaper and various natural history programmes and drama-documentaries for BBC Radio 4. He is the author of Herbaceous (2014) and Field Notes from the Edge: Journeys through Britain’s Secret Wilderness (2016), and lives in Much Wenlock, Shropshire, where he was born.
About Petra Börner
Petra Börner, originally from Sweden, is an artist and illustrator based in London. She studied Fashion Design at St Martin’s School of Art in London, and her first commissions came from Elle and Vogue. Through numerous commissions by clients including the V&A, Oscars, Carven and Penguin Random House, her signature style features in a variety of cross-industry collaborations. Her work has been exhibited worldwide, at the National Portrait Gallery, Claire de Rouen, the Design Museum in London, Portefoin in Paris, as well as at the Swedish Embassy in Tokyo.