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A title from The Old School Press Twelve Poems Twelve poems by David Burnett with wood-engravings by Sister Margaret Tournour |
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About the book Twelve poems by David Burnett with wood-engravings by Sister Margaret Tournour. About the edition The poems are set in
12pt Cancelleresca Bastarda. Each opening shows one poem with its wood-engraving
and is effectively a half sheet of Saunders Waterford paper, giving a page size
of 380mm by 280mm. All but fifteen copies of the edition of 135 were bound by
Rachel James in full dark green cloth with end-papers of Canson Mi Teintes, the
front cover carrying a label illustrated with one of Sister Margaret’s
engravings. All copies were signed by both poet and artist. Fifteen sets of
sheets (numbers 40-54) were reserved for binders together with end papers and
necessary labels. Bound copies £36. Sets of sheets £18. The story When Simon Brett was signing the edition of The Fruits of Jane Austen I commented that getting new texts was a priority. He said that he still occasionally received texts from people looking for a publisher but that since he no longer ran his Paulinus Press there was nothing he could do with them. Following this he sent me three items that looked promising and which I subsequently published: Copper Beech, Punting to Islip, and The Phoenix. David Burnett had sent Simon a collection of twelve poems (under the title of one: Copper Beech) together with a set of wood engravings by Sister Margaret Tournour, a retired nun who was once an illustrator for Oxford University Press. Simon commented that her engravings were very delicate and that Sister Margaret had not served her cause well as she tended to submit her work mounted in a way that detracted from the quality of the engravings. I contacted David Burnett and we agreed that I should publish the engravings and the poems. In thinking about a page layout my first inclination was an octavo given the small size of both engravings and poems. But this would have led to an entirely conventional and rather uninteresting format. As I experimented it became clear that a page which was a quarter of a sheet of standard mould-made paper – the largest I could actually get into our C&P treadle platen – would serve the texts and the images best, and, moreover, give the opportunity to place the images on the page as if they were windows onto a larger landscape. The poems could then be placed on the facing page to balance them. My first thoughts of type face were of Caslon since I had invested in it for The Fruits of Jane Austen. It looked very big however, especially with the longer poems, and it was around this time that I bought two small founts of 12pt and 16pt Cancelleresca Bastarda from Mark Arman. It shared the same delicacy as the engravings and brought the texts down to a more appropriate scale. Setting the 12pt is like setting blades of grass but the effect is lovely. Having struggled with the Fabriano despite Simon Brett’s deep cutting, I first of all thought of using a more forgiving Zerkall paper but tests suggested that the large areas of black in Sister Margaret’s engravings would show through on to the text pages that backed onto the images and spoil the effect of the large areas of open space. I found myself moving to a much denser paper and finally fixed on Saunders Waterford, which was not without its difficulty especially as I planned to print it dry. I discussed the idea of damping, and even of printing on a gampi vellum and tipping in the engravings, with Simon Lawrence but finally plumped for the cleanest approach and printed dry directly onto the Saunders. The agreement was that I should first see whether I could successfully print Sister Margaret’s blocks to her satisfaction before committing to an edition. I chose the hardest (as I saw it) – the hare – and David sent me the block. I knew that Sister Margaret liked her blocks to be printed rather grey. Getting the balance between sufficient ink on the large areas of black and not too much inking filling her extremely lightly cut lines was very hard. We met at Stanbrook Abbey where she occasionally went on a retreat (fitting, given that the Cancelleresca was one of the Abbey’s house faces) and she was pleased with the results so I went ahead with planning the full edition. David Burnett brought the blocks personally to Bath one very fine day when we had lunch and talk outside. It was then that I found that a number were engraved on both sides and that about half were practice blocks from Lawrences, in other words not necessarily square front-to-back, and/or were less than type-high. With some trepidation I sent most of them to Lawrences’ block-maker in Redruth to have them backed and trued as necessary. Finally printing could start. It was about this time that, sorting the founts of Cancelleresca Bastarda, I found that the 16pt which I intended to use for poem titles and the title page was missing a cap C. This only caused a problem with the poem The Copper Beech and hence the book which took its name from it. I persuaded David Burnett to have the collection called Twelve Poems and considered using all lower case for the poem titles, ie The copper beech. Some way into printing the engraving of the wren’s feather I realised (after checking against the proof from Sister Margaret) that it was upside down; a small percentage of the edition has this ‘fault’ though you would not know it. Again, compared to Zerkall, the Waterford from T H Saunders was hard going. I chose it for its thickness – I was concerned not to let the image from the recto of each leaf show through to the poem in the verso. It was a nice weight – 190gsm – but surface-sized and rather hard, not unlike the Fabriano I struggled with on The Fruits of Jane Austen. Published on the day of the Oxford Fine Press Fair: 22nd October 1994. |
