Wednesday 30 October 2013

Images for Oxford Fine Press Fair - new books













here are some pics for Marbhna - Elegy - I have chosen the most picture-y ones I suppose but I was interested too in the way the indentations from the woodcuts and collagraphs showed through on the back and interacted with the following texts too in a lot of places - hard to show on the websit - come to the fair!



Here also some little Nelson books and "Horatia's Box" that we had in the Tom Paine Press shop window for Trafalgar Day.
I have always had a soft spot for Nelson since I was taken to see the Victory  on a primary school outing ( the powder monkeys sounded particularly fascinating, tho I'm not sure I visualised them with correct historical accuracy, being always of an imaginative turn of mind.....)


The Naval Museum at Greenwich have just opened a new display, but it sounds as though they are playing down his heroic status and concentrating rightly enough 

on his men too; his men thought he was a hero by all accounts; bit of a shame to be too politically correct, we can always do with a few heroes.....
I read a wonderful novel about Nelson's daughter Horatia and her troubled relationship with poor Emma - she never was acknowledged as her mother of course and Horatia refused to accept it too , although she eventually knew that Nelson, who was overjoyed by the birth of his daughte but died whilst she was still in infancy, was her real father. Both daughter and Emma were treated abominably by both government and society and bundled of to exile in France; but Horatia lived to a fine old age and had several children herself and a good marriage, so there is a happy ending of sorts.

These are some little books with shell covers and woodcuts of the playground skipping rhyme about Nelson from my youth and images of the wonderful popular pottery his life and legend inspired.

All this was inspired too by my trip to Norfolk for the Norwich Book Fair TTP last spring - 
as was the Man in the Moon book ( see below 2 posts back) ....

Also now newly bound 'Hunting the Wren' and 'Love Poems and Curses', collaboration with poems by James Simpson




sorry- taken on a wet dark day so rather lurid colour.....

Monday 28 October 2013

Late Info - Oxford Fine Press Fair this weekend 2-3 November

at Oxford Brookes University, Gypsy Lane, Headington 

I WILL be there exhibiting: I have just been in a tunnel of finishing books and have 2 days left to get my endpapers pasted down...I will try and take some photos in the next day or so, of new books and bindings....including, finally after 6 years of dithering, the book I wrote and began imaging when on a residency in Donegal...
keep checking this space for photos
hope to see you there
Book fair details on fpba website

www.fpba.com