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A title from The Old School Press Tonge's Travels The diary of an
Oxford undergraduate: the Mediterranean by cargo steamer in 1857 | ||
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About the book I have always enjoyed travel writing, especially when it shows travel in its true light: general awfulness punctuated by moments of great pleasure. Some years ago I acquired a manuscript diary which, a recent handwritten slip inside suggests, was written by George Tonge who went up to Lincoln College, Oxford in 1856, and subsequently entered the Church. According to his diary, George Tonge (if indeed it was he) had decided that the Long Vacation at the end of his first year would be spent on some form of voyage, and, in the event, on 15 July 1857 he boarded the screw steamer Avon which was headed for the Mediterranean in search of a cargo of currants. The 282 manuscript pages of his diary take us on a ten-week journey to Gibraltar, Genoa, Pisa, Naples, Vesuvius (avoiding falling debris), Pompeii, a detour on foot and horse to Corinth, Athens (which clearly made a deep impression on him), Vastitza ('began loading early and shipped about 80 tons of currants', 'had a bathe close to the vessel with a man looking out for sharks'), and back via Algiers. Stowaways are put back on land, the rigging breaks, the engineer blows himself up, and bandits are avoided. For a flavour of the diarist's writing, click on the 'excerpt' button below. One of John Watts's watercolours from the book
About the edition The edition was reduced to 160 copies with some sets of sheets reserved for binders. The book is in a generous landscape format (230mm high by 300mm wide) to allow the text to run in double columns and provide the right shape for twenty-four watercolours and sketches by John Watts, much as a traveller of the day might have committed sights and thoughts to paper where today we would use video and digital images. John's illustrations have been reproduced by off-set litho. Printing a diary also gives us another excuse for using the written as well as the printed word in the book: snippets of Tonge's account have been hand-written by calligrapher Patricia Gidney and printed letterpress. The text has been printed letterpress in 12/14pt Monotype Centaur on Mohawk Superfine eggshell finish paper, and copies are bound in full cloth with a dust-jacket bearing one of John Watts's line drawings. 114pp. The price was £80 for bound copies, and £50 for sheets. | ||
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Find out more about the book |
View the title page of the book: |
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Read an excerpt from the book: |
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What others have said about the book |
‘An unexpected pleasure and will be much enjoyed’, ‘a perfectly delightful book’, ‘It’s a delightful book, beautifully produced’ |
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The story In 1993 I bought a manuscript diary at a Dominic Winter book auction. When I scanned it at the viewing the day before the sale I was mainly keen to find something about Venice for a second book on the city, but the traveller concerned had not been there, though he had clearly been around. Speculatively I put in a bid for the book and got it. Now I had in front of me 283 pages of manuscript, not easily legible to modern eyes. It would clearly make a big book – way beyond anything I could contemplate doing on the C&P. Should I edit it down? Even if I did I would have to make a word-processed transcript first and that looked just too daunting. And then it would be necessary to have it machine cast. All in all, the whole project looked out of court. There was also no indication in the diary itself of who the author was, though there was a ballpoint-written scrap of paper in the diary with an entry for a George Tonge from Alumni Oxoniensis slipped inside and, on reading the diary, I found that the author (if it was Tonge) was up at Oxford in 1857 and possibly lived somewhere called Tonge House. The evidence was circumstantial but irrelevant as the diary had sufficient intrinsic interest to make it worth pursuing. And there it rested for some years. In 2000 three things came together that helped the project make sense. Firstly, the Western proof press was finally working that May. Secondly, I had bought a voice recognition system for my PC and it seemed to work well enough to permit the text of the diary to be dictated straight into a Word document – a major hurdle overcome. Thirdly, I had discussed with Graham Moss the practicality of using Harry McIntosh and his Mactronic system for Monotype casting from digital copy. Not only could I get the text into an editable and usable form relatively easily, but I could have the type machine cast without rekeying, and I had a press big enough to print sizeable pages four or more at a time. Having spoken the text into Word and corrected it, I read the whole thing out to Angela for checking against the manuscript. We decided that the best form of editing would be to stick precisely to Tonge’s text, even staying faithful to his poor spelling and grammar and punctuation – all of which, it seemed to me, were part of the diary’s charm. By late 2000 the text was more or less ready, at least good enough to give a copy to John Watts, to tempt him to doing watercolours for it. I wanted the whole thing to have a little of the character of a travel notebook, and hence wanted images that were more sketches than fully finished, as if they had been done in the field. John undertook the commission agreeing to have a set of watercolours ready for the following spring. Winter, with short days and poor light, was not the best time for John to work on the images, but he went ahead. Before long we were leafing through a pile of preliminary drawings in pencil and charcoal that he had done. I would have been happy with those but was told that they were just studies. Although I had asked him to do something that looked quick and free, he pointed out that he did not have the subject in front of him and therefore would have to draw that scene first so that he had the structure available and could then do the ‘impromptu’ watercolour. The results were as wonderful and ideal for the purpose as I expected and from the set of thirty or more I chose twenty-four that had a similar spontaneous feel, rejecting the more finished images (though the scene on the title page – so suited for that purpose – was one which was more finished that the rest). I also chose some line drawings that would do well for line blocks to vary the fare a little. To add yet more flavour, I had thought of having some of Tonge’s spicier words written out and underprinted in pale colours through the text. After a false start with another calligrapher I commissioned Patricia Gidney to take forty phrases and write them in a ‘naïve’ hand that was more legible than Tonge’s but similar. It had not occurred to me at that time to figure out the consequences of underprinting in a second colour (twice the amount of printing), and it was only when the work started that I realised that that was crazy that I decided to place the text snippets at the side or bottom of the main text and print them in black at the same time as the pages themselves. In the event I used about thirty phrases through the book. I had found the Mohawk Superfine a nice paper to print on with a small type when doing the prospectus so decided to give the off-white a go for this title. There was insufficient in the UK, so a special shipment was ordered from the US mill. I went to BAS Printers for the four-colour work, having been pleased with how they handled The Fell Revival and having heard good reports of their handling of watercolours from Dennis Hall and others. The cost of having just 350 copies of four-colour work done was of course crazy. (Not least I had to deliver to them 2,400 sheets of paper for the 1,050 I actually wanted. As a result I ended up with twice as many image sheets as I needed but some at least came in useful for the prospectus.) Twenty-four images made twenty-four pages which went onto three sheets of the Mohawk. I had wet proofs of just one sheet done to check that things were looking right on that paper, and then gave the go-ahead. I had the whole shipment of paper sent to them, so that they could print on their 2,400 sheets and then cut those – and all the rest – in half to make a size that would fit on the Western. Pretty much on the same day, 9,000 sheets of Mohawk arrived from BAS and 1,750 sheets of Mohawk for A Long Story. The press room was filling with mountains of paper. I knew from the outset that I did not want to do a Victorian book or in any way mimic the time of the diary. It was to be a new book in a contemporary style. 12pt Centaur offered the right extent – about 128pp – and a further two points of leading gave it a little air. I worked hard on the mise en page, following Tschichold’s constructions as a starter and then varying for the sort of line length and running heads I wanted. I also needed to leave room for the written text snippets. The display face for the titles took a while to find: I had some good elongated roman that I had bought from Jonathan Stephenson, but it looked too 19th-century and so I cast about for something modern. I found on my PC fonts one called Lithograph which I found to be in reality Carol Twombly’s Lithos. It looked ideal: a late-20th-century rendering of ancient Greek capitals. It also worked well with the chiselled feel of Centaur. Only the one size of Centaur was used throughout the book. I printed the book and chapter titles on my inkjet printer in two sizes and had blocks made. All told the book needed twenty-seven days of machining, each wind of the cylinder producing four pages. In a day it would generally take me three hours to take down the previous forme and build the next one and get the make-ready and inking right, and then a further three hours to wind through 350 copies with Angela taking them off the cylinder and interleaving them. It took a while to realise what sort of regime was needed to be in place to achieve fast and reliable results: keeping the running heads together for dropping in, standardising on the furniture I used, and generally keeping as many things constant from one forme to the next as I could. Gradually, the piles of packed sheets in the press room were transformed into printed sheets on our landing – the only place in the house where they could be stacked and reasonably out of the way. It was as the printing went into the second half that the weather started to get a little damper as we went into late Autumn (the press room was, in reality, a double garage with up-and-over doors), and I discovered how hygroscopic the Mohawk is: it would cockle into four or five waves along the long edges, making it difficult to get it under the grippers on the Western. Worse, the cockling did not disappear if the paper was brought indoors into the dry and I had to seal all the unused stuff in plastic bags though by this time it was getting bad. After the success of the dustjacket for The Fell Revival I thought to try it again for this title – the subject matter and contents said that an illustrated cover was needed more than a patterned paper, and I thought the initial line drawing study for the watercolour that became the title page was ideal for a cover so had a line block made, trying it out first on a poster. I used the same Canson as for the end-papers, and although I used the sheet uncut it made a rather mean dustjacket with the flaps an inch shorter than they would ideally have been. I could have squeezed a slightly longer sheet on the press if it had been available. As it was I found I had ordered all the remaining stock of that colour of Canson in the UK and fresh had to be ordered from France. My target was to take as much of the book as I could to the October Oak Knoll Fest in New Castle, Delaware. In the event I had about two thirds printed (including of course all the illustrations) and that was what went to Oak Knoll where we sold some copies. When I picked up the dummy from Rachel James and turned the pages I was shocked at some of the layout – I could not understand how I had made such a mess of it: a page finishing five lines short, the left-hand column shorter than the right on short pages at chapter ends, and so on. Four pages were so bad that I decided I would simply have to reprint them. By this time the remaining unused Mohawk was getting pretty bad and I could only print on one half of it. Even then, one page has uneven left and right columns, p20 is numbered p21 and there is one page that has a word-space printed. Hey ho. |
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