Given what passes for books from many publishers these days (poorly edited, poorly printed, poorly bound), it's always a pleasure to report on books that are still made the old-fashioned way: from hand-set type, designed and printed (with multi-block illustrations in precise register) on really fine paper, finely bound in the finest appropriate materials. Nobody makes books this way anymore, except for a few die-hard fine press printers, illustrators, bookbinders. Praise (your preferred deity) for every single one of 'em!
As noted in our series of posts on fine press books (3-6 May 2009), one of the best places to fully experience the beauty and glory of fine press printing is one of the three major biennial fairs devoted to the subject, one of which just recently concluded. The Oxford Fine Press Book Fair regularly attracts some five dozen fine presses from around the world, and the books each press exhibits at this fair are some of the finest examples of the book as art that you are ever likely to encounter. Even for folks who do fine press printing for a living, this embarrassment of riches often makes it difficult to hand out accolades for the best of the best, which this fair does via two major awards, the Judges' Choice Awards (for Best Book in Show) and The Gregynog Prize (for the finest letterpress book printed in the past two years).
Images of such award winners cannot even begin to convey the tactile experience of holding one of these books in your hands. But they will, hopefully, give you some sense (however paltry) of what has been lost in modern-day publishing.
This year's Judges' Choice Awards went to Circle Press for its printing of Full Circle Editions' (a new publishing house founded, in part, by Harry Potter's "discoverer-in-chief") The Burning of the Books (a poem sequence by George Szirtes based on 1981 Nobel Laureate' Elias Canetti's "book destruction nightmare" Auto da Fé, illustrated in gravure by Ron King)...
...to Russell Maret for his tour de force of color letterpress printing, Aethelwold...
...to Parvenu Press for its haunting engagement with the traditional fairy tale, And Other Fairy Tales...
...to Shirley Sharoff for her artist's book, The Waves (text by Virginia Woolf)...
...and to Whittington Press (publisher of Matrix, arguably the world's finest continuing periodical about fine press printing) for Portmeirion (home to The Prisoner television series of cult fame), a fine example of what can be achieved with modern technology (in this case, a digital drawing tablet, which duplicates somewhat the earlier hand-colored illustration process known as pochoir)...
The winner of The Gregynog Prize for the best letterpress printed book of the past two years...? Lone Oak Press, for its stunning take on the British horticulturist' Reginald Farrer's work about plants that he particularly disliked, Mimpish Squinnies: Reginald Farrer’s Short Guide to Worthless Plants. Wittily illustrated by Abigail Rorer, beautifully designed and printed by Kat Ran Press on Kozo paper from type set by Michael and Winifred Bixler, with a Mark Tomlinson binding of handmade plant fiber paper-over-boards and a green leather spine, this title is indeed a worthy recipient of such a prestigious award:
Our congratulations to one and all! May you live long and prosper....
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