THE OLD SCHOOL PRESS

A listing of all our out-of-print books

Use the 'history' button to the left for a complete list of titles.

Venice Approached

An extract from John Ruskin's The Stones of Venice

A printing of an extract from chapter 30 of book one and chapter 1 of book two of John Ruskin’s The Stones of Venice. Hand-set in 24pt Bembo italic, printed on Zerkall in a large landscape format, the paper folded on the fore-edge and all copies bound in the Japanese style. One illustration: the Venice waterline from the Dogana, printed from a line-block of a digitally processed photograph. 31pp.

Fifty copies. Copies I to XII were bound by Rachel James, with a black card protective wallet bearing the title on one edge and inside the first flap. Copies I to VI each covered with a different hand-blocked paper from Legatoria Piazzesi, Venice; the binding tape was red. Copies VII to XII were covered with paper specially hand-marbled in the Spanish style by Ann Muir, with a slate blue rippled background on which black, gold, and terracotta ‘globules’ float; the binding tape was black. Copies 13 to 50 were bound with soft covers of hand-made Wookey Hole Royal carrying the title pasted on, printed from the same type as that used for the title page; they were presented in a simple wrapper of black card, the title on the spine and again on the front cover. Ordinaries £19 (ISBN 0 9522335 5 X). Specials £44 (ISBN 0 9522335 0 9).

The Fruits of Jane Austen

Ten extracts from Jane Austen's letters  and novels with eight wood-engravings by Simon Brett

Hand-set in 14pt Caslon Old Style, printed on 200gsm Fabriano Artistico. Quarter bound by Rachel James in sky blue cloth with Claire Maziarczyk’s Sun Shower paste paper on the boards. 135 copies.  Bound copies £39. Sheets £10. (ISBN 0 9522335 1 7)
 

Twelve Poems

Twelve poems by David Burnett with wood-engravings by Sister Margaret Tournour

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. (ISBN 0 9522335 4 1)
 

Venice Visited

Extracts from Coryat's Crudities with pochoir illustrations by John Thornton

Punting to Islip

A narrative poem by Eddie Flintoff, with wood-engravings and linocut by Simon Brett

The one thing I remember doing a lot of when up at Cambridge in the late 1960s was punting on the Cam. So Eddie Flintoff's new narrative poem Punting to Islip rang many emotional bells when I first received it from him via Simon Brett, and its poignancy for idyllic days matched mine. Eddie's poem really deserves to be read out loud, having as many sonic qualities as typographic, though I have followed Eddie's proposed layout, adding only a gentle curve to the flow of the river of text. There are many moods and changes of mood that a better typographer than I could have exploited on the page, to echo the changes of pace and tone that would come through in speech. Nevertheless, I think it all still works.

The title page has a linocut and wood engraving pair by Simon Brett picturing the scene as it might have looked to Eddie's eyes in the 1950s; the linocut is printed in a paler colour 'under' the wood engraving. The title page also has a calligraphic title. Click on the thumbnail above to see more. A further wood-engraving makes a fine tail-piece.

The edition consists of 150 copies and is signed by Simon Brett. The text is hand-set in 10pt Monotype Gill Sans and printed on dampened hand-made Japanese kawanaka ivory paper. The 120 copies of the standard edition are bound in a Japanese style: double sheets are folded on the fore-edge and sewn with ribbon between covers of blue hand-made Richard de Bas paper in a landscape format (about 190mm by 230mm). Pages of the poem face each other, verso and recto. The poem is 14pp long. Ordinaries are £33 (Euro60, US$63), specials £64. (ISBN 0 9522335 3 3)

The Phoenix

A translation by Eddie Flintoff, from the Latin of Lactantius, with pochoir by Peter Allen

When he sent me the manuscript for Punting to Islip which I published in 1994, Eddie Flintoff enclosed his translation – the first for almost a century – of the poem De Ave Phoenice by Lactantius. The Phoenix is an early indicator of the kind of religious revolution that was going on in the time of Constantine, the very era that saw Christianity's ascent as a major world religion. Roman religious feeling was searching its way towards a philosophical reinterpretation of the old myths and legends, hoping to stabilise ancestral ways of thought that were looking increasingly threadbare, by reinterpreting them as moral allegories.

Lactantius was an early Christian theologian and professional rhetor, who attempted to align Christian symbolic teaching with aspects of the old culture, claiming that the church would be the inheritor of the best of classical culture. His claim that Christianity was the true heir of Roman civilised ideals must have seemed no more than bare-faced cheek in the fourth century when he was writing. He offers the symbol of the Phoenix and its mythical rebirth from the ashes of its own death as a symbol of Christ – and thereby as a symbol of the soul's rebirth into immortality.

The poem is vivid and colourful and provides a splendid opportunity to bring together a number of media – and contributors – in presenting Eddie's translation. Calligrapher Alun Briggs has written the text in a hand based on a mid fifth-century Italian manuscript, and it is from blocks made from his writing that the text has been printed. The poem demands coloured illustrations and Peter Allen has designed and pochoired five very striking three-colour full-page illustrations to accompany the text. Finally, to provide context to the poem, its subject matter, and its author, Dr John McGuckin, Reader in Patristic and Byzantine Theology at the University of Leeds, has provided a new introductory essay. The Press is following a long tradition: Aldus's heirs published a Lactantius edition including De Ave Phoenice in 1535, as did Claude Garamont in 1545.

The edition consists of 150 copies. 135 copies have been bound in full black cloth by The Fine Bindery, and a further fifteen sets of sheets were reserved for binders. The standard edition of the book is 213mm by 240mm on Zerkall mould-made paper. The introductory essay is printed in 12pt Monotype Perpetua italic, and supporting material in foundry Perpetua italic. 37pp. Ordinaries (ISBN 978 0 9522335 6 5) £63 (€110, US$110).

The twenty-five de luxe copies had a gilt top edge and end-papers of the beautiful Vega Blanc hand-made paper from the Larroque mill, a white paper with gold flecks; each de luxe copy also contained a portfolio of the pochoir illustrations signed by Peter Allen held in a folder of Vega Blanc, all contained in a slipcase. £96.

The Bricks of Venice

An important new text written and illustrated with watercolours by Peter Harris

Our first book, Venice Approached, was an excerpt from John Ruskin's The Stones of Venice, in particular the passage where he describes arriving in Venice from Padua, taking a gondola from the Brenta. This new title is, in its author's words, 'no parody of Ruskin's masterpiece, but offered in homage.'

Peter Harris lived and worked in Venice for seven years, with enough leisure to study in depth the architecture of Venice and to read extensively about the city. The Bricks of Venice was years in writing and in research, and is a memorial to his great love of the city.

You can read a chapter from the book, pretty much in the format that it appears in the book, by clicking on the 'excerpt' button to the left.

The 96pp of text were printed in 14/16pt Bembo on a large page of Magnani mould-made paper. These pages were then bound into a volume with a hand-blocked paper on the boards - the paper was prepared especially for the edition by Alberto Valese in Venice, using a pattern taken from the facade of Ca' d'Oro, one of the finest Gothic palaces on the Grand Canal, and just along from the building in which Peter Harris and his wife lived. Each illustration was printed on a separate sheet of 225gsm Somerset paper made of 100% cotton , making it easier to follow the illustrations when they are called for in the text and also to frame and display them individually. To print the images I used an Epson 2100 printer using pigment-based inks thereby assuring good longevity of the images. The seventy-two sheets of images are separated by chapter with sheets of brown Fabriano Ingres on which captions are printed to accompany the images. These sheets are collected in a solander box which is covered in another paper from Alberto Valese - a repeated tile pattern in grey. The solander box and bound volume are presented in a slip case in a pale yellow cloth with a spine label. Click on the button above to see a number of views of the book and its parts. (33cm high, 23.5cm wide, 8.5cm deep - 13in high, 9.25in wide, 3.25in deep.)

Harris achieves a pleasing balance between contemporary observation and historical context, and sixty-six delightful watercolours and six other images fill out the story perfectly - you can view two of the watercolours by clicking on the thumbnail above (but please note that faithful colour reproduction on displays depends on too many factors outside my control!). He wrote the following about his book:

An exhibition of Harris's original watercolours was held at The Arts Club, London, and the book was published at the opening reception on 16 February 2005. There was another exhibition of the watercolours at the Palazzo delle Prigione in Venice, adjacent to the Bridge of Sighs, 10-28 January 2007. In January 2008 the book was centre stage at the Library of The John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art in Sarasota, Florida, where Francesca Harris, Peter Harris's widow, gave a reading from the book - the display case below had some of the watercolours on show.

 (ISBN 978 1 899933 18 1)

The price of the book was £220 (E300, US$390).

Three Pieces

Three hitherto unpublished essays by Harry Carter

During their researches on Harry Carter's life and work, the authors of Harry Carter, Typographer came across about 150pp of typescript material that he had drafted towards a second volume of his history of Oxford University Press. Unfortunately, that volume was never to see the light of day, but we have taken the opportunity to publish two of the essays in that typescript. The first, Bradley’s Observations, describes what was (in Carter’s words) ‘the worst dereliction of duty in the history of the Press’ and is fascinatingly tied up with the £20,000 prize offered under the Longitude Act of 1714 for an accurate way of determining longitude. The second, Thomas Bensley as a Partner, is a tale of fraud and deception at the Press.

In August 1932, Carter sent an essay on the influence of John Baskerville on type design to Jan van Krimpen for inclusion in the first issue of a proposed successor to The Fleuron, but that also never came to fruition. Carter's essay on this most influential of English type designers - whose tercentenary is in 2006 - makes the third item in this volume of his work.

We originally published these three essays as an extra volume in the de luxe copies of Harry Carter, Typographer, but it was evident from the speed with which those sold out that there would be a demand for the essays on their own so we have run on a small edition.

The text is printed in 12D/15 Romulus on a hand-made Van Gelder paper. (I rescued this paper from the defunct print-shop of the Carthusian monastery at Parkminster in Sussex. The ream had a single worm-hole running through it and some copies have this hole as a feature on one or more pages, though mostly in the margin or gutter. I think it adds a touch of romance to the book.) Case-bound in green cloth with a label on the front-board. The title page carries a photograph of Carter. 28pp. There were eighty copies of which about fifty were for sale at £35 (E65, US$70). These are all sold but I have one copy that is an 'over' from the de luxe edition of Harry Carter, Typographer. It is exactly the same but is out of series (ie not numbered) and has a redundant pocket in the back of the binding. I am selling it for £20 (E30, US$40). (ISBN 978 1 899933 20 4)

Henry James Sat Here

Reflections on Siena with poems by Anne Coon and images by Kurt Feuerherm

In April 2002, over a lunch of panini and Sienese ribollita soup, two long-time friends, Kurt Feuerherm and Anne Coon, were enjoying a chilly spring day in Siena, Italy. Siena’s Campo was filled with children, their parents, and the gathering tourists, when the conversation turned to the past and to the painters and writers who had once sat where Kurt and Anne were sitting. That conversation marked the beginning of a collaboration that led to Henry James Sat Here, a volume of poetry and mixed media artwork (watercolour, collage, and ink) blending Anne’s words and Kurt’s images. Some pairings evoke the moods and colours of the Tuscan landscape; others capture the faces and figures seen in the streets of Siena; still others suggest the abstractions of dream and memory, the troubled sleep of a person far from home.

As a Professor of Language and Literature in the College of Liberal Arts at Rochester Institute of Technology (Rochester, New York), Anne teaches Creative Writing, Italian Poetry, Modern Poetry, and Patterns in Poetry and Mathematics. The poems in Henry James Sat Here have been selected from a longer poem cycle, Via del Paradiso, in which Anne created an intimate record of the months she lived in Siena. Living alone and learning the language, she comes to know the city, its people, and its cultural past; at the same time, she begins to understand herself in a new way, as outsider, observer, and then participant in a world where she is 'always among others'.

During the 1990s, Kurt lived and taught in Florence, Italy, and travelled extensively throughout Tuscany, and his art focuses on the abstraction of nature-related subjects. Kurt’s artwork for this book – some pieces taken from sketchbooks he kept while living in Florence and others done while sitting at a cafe table or later in his studio – complements and illustrates the poems while also comprising a powerful, independent body of work.

I have printed nine poem-image pairs and I wanted to do something manageable in a small edition and in an interesting way. I have always been looking for ways of allowing a book to act as a display of its contents as well as a straightforward codex, with pages that you turn. tokonoma was one such attempt. Henry James Sat Here (the title of one of Anne's poems) is in a format that allows it to stand open on its own for display, sit on the knees for reading, and fold into a container for storage on the shelf - click on the button above to see how it works. Basically the nine poem-image pairs are joined together to form a zig-zag of openings, the ends of which can then be turned to face each other to form a circle for display. When folded up, the zig-zag can be dropped into a Japanese-style portfolio, strictly a shallow box with four drop-over flaps. One half-height flap come down from the top, and a second up from the bottom. Two further flaps fold over from right and left, and on the inside of each are the title page and the colophon page respectively which, in this way, become part of the container rather than of the book itself.

This has been a good opportunity to use our 14pt Octavian again - it stands up so well in poetry, especially with strong images - and I have used the same inkjet technology for Kurt's images as I used for Peter Harris's watercolours in The Bricks of Venice. It is capable of rendering both subtlety and intensity on 100% cotton papers and with archival quality. The entire book is printed on 225gsm Somerset watercolour paper.

There are ninety-five copies of which only sixty are for sale. £150 (€240, US$300). (ISBN 978 1 899933 22 8)

On 26 October 2006, in Rochester Public Library, Kurt and Anne had a reception, a brief reading, and exhibit of the book and Kurt's Italian paintings. Kurt's work and Henry James Sat Here were then on display for a month in a gallery at the library.

Oxford's Ornaments

A survey and display of the typographical ornaments at Oxford University Press

The text faces that Bishop John Fell acquired for Oxford University Press in the seventeenth century have always had a special attraction for typophiles and, over the decades, have had their due attention. By contrast, the ornaments that Fell and others collected for use at Oxford University Press have received relatively little coverage.

The majority of the type that escaped the smelter at the closure of the Printing House in 1989 was for setting text, but there are in fact around eighty founts of ornaments still in packets. We were delighted to have been given permission by OUP to prepare a small edition showing these remaining ornaments.

The book provides a simple display of each of the extant ornaments, printed using the actual type, with brief notes on each drawn from Stanley Morison’s coverage in his John Fell, the University Press and the ‘Fell’ types and Horace Hart’s catalogue in his A Century of Typography. In particular, the notes for each ornament cover its origins where known, and give details about the punch and/or matrix for it where they are still in OUP’s possession. The book contains a number of typographical arrangements drawn from one of OUP’s own pattern books, fifteen photographs of original materials in OUP's archives (punches, matrices, type specimens, etc), a facsimile of Horace Hart's Synopsis of Fell ornaments printed on a Simili Japon as a fold-out, and further arrangements on a paper hand-made by Batchelor for OUP. 72pp.

Printing the ornaments presented some technical problems, since all type at the University Press at Oxford was set on a higher body than conventional English type. You can read about some of the difficulties created by following the clippings in the archive - click on the 'progress' button above. And there are a number of photographs showing some of the materials we worked with in a sequence that you can reach with the 'the story' button above.

The text was machine-set in 13pt Monotype Van Dijck and was printed letterpress on a demy quarto page of a quantity of an antique Rives BFK paper. The book was case-bound in full cloth, and was uniform in size with our previous titles on OUP (282mm high by 225mm wide). The end-papers and dust-jacket were of Hahnemühle Bugra Bütten. The price was £95 (€160/US$210) plus shipping at cost. Some customers who have collected our de luxe editions of our earlier books on OUP were able to request their copy to be bound in quarter-leather with an Ann Muir marbled paper on the boards and presented in a slipcase (£140, €225, US$300). Sets of sheets were also available (£60, €90, US$120).

There was an edition of just 123 copies, with most going to subscribers, each of whom received an ad personam copy, named and numbered in the press. There were 74 copies in the standard binding and 42 in the de luxe, with seven sets of unbound sheets being sold to binders.