As we have said before, this section on forthcoming books is always written with a certain determined wistfulness. We make books almost entirely by hand, usually with substantial texts, and it is an occupation haunted by haps and mishaps. The books we announce and discuss here are indeed in process, and will be finished, but we have learned that projected dates are endlessly flexible – not because we wish them to be, but because those metaphysical bureaucrats, the Fates, become increasingly jocular as we get older. So we ask your patience, and invite your trust. The books will emerge. This, together with death and taxes, is sure.

Bordering on the Sublime: Ornamental Typography at the Curwen Press is now progressing steadily. David Jury’s opening section of text has long been completely printed, folded, collated, and packed. We have now (August 2024) completed well over a hundred pages of Crispin’s section of the book’s text, which comprises a Preamble and four substantial sections: I. Historical Notes on Printers’ Ornaments; II. ‘The Visual World at Play’: Stanley Morison and the Type Revivals; III. Apropos the Unicorn: Curwen in the Twenties and Later; and IV. Bert E Smith, Compositor, and the Curwen Borders.

Section IV, on Bert Smith, has grown to be considerably longer than we first imagined. Bob Richardson at St. Bride Printing Museum in London, due to having unexpected free time during the pandemic, most generously offered to help us, and his research on the subject has made this chapter possible. He was able to discover some solid information about Bert E Smith – the compositor at Curwen who created most, if not all, of the borders – but even at this late date more details are emerging. We now know his full name, his date and place of birth, the year he began his apprenticeship, and the names of his wife, daughter, and grandchildren, along with some anecdotal facts about his life and interests, such as his love of gardening and his purchase of an Adana press for hobby printing upon his retirement. Given that at first we knew nothing at all about him apart from his name and the fact that he worked with ornaments at Curwen, it is wonderful to see how he has begun to take form beyond his reputation as a designer and compositor of brilliant and distinctive decorative borders. Bob was able to contact one of Bert’s grandchildren in the Autumn of 2021 and has met her and several of her relatives to talk about Bert and glean some further facts.

The initial research and writing of all Crispin’s sections of the text took most of 2022 and about ten months of 2023, and further revisions and some additions continue to be made as the work is being set: Crispin’s typescript setting copy is covered with revisions, scratchings out, and addenda in the margins. Three appendices will follow, as will a complete index, which a book as complex and full of detail as Bordering on the Sublime will require: its omission would be unforgivably impractical.

We estimate now that Bordering on the Sublime will probably not be completed until the summer of 2025 – and by ‘completed’ we refer to the completion of the presswork; after that must come the folding and collating of the printed sheets, the hand-tipping of a great many inserts onto them, and finally the binding, which is certain to take many months.
This means that, if we are to survive financially, we must as usual continue to produce some smaller books while the Curwen project is ongoing. While working on two projects simultaneously might be seen as distracting attention from both, in practice this is not the case. It is certainly true that ‘multi-tasking’ is too often touted these days as a desirable and admired skill, when it is frequently only an indulgent excuse for not having paid sufficient attention to anything one is doing. However, we find that a balance between a large and complex book and a smaller, more homogeneous one can be mutually illuminating, one acting as a counterpoint or descant to the other, each allowing a chance to stand back and view the other objectively. We enjoy working on every book we produce. And it would be disingenuous not to point out that with Apollonia and Lea also working in the pressroom, we will now have two presses working nearly all the time.

Pastoral Elegies

Note that work on Pastoral Elegies was completed in the late spring of 2024, and the last copies will soon be delivered from the bindery. Please go to the page on Pastoral Elegies in Books in Print for more detailed information.

An Eye Made Quiet: A Selection of Odes, Lyrics, and Sonnets by William Wordsworth

The arrival of our grandson, Michael, in November 2023, inspired Jan to prepare a collection of poems by Wordsworth concerned with childhood and the natural world. Her work on Wordsworth many years ago for her Master’s thesis has, it seems, come home to roost. The book contains two major poems – ‘Lines composed a few miles above Tintern Abbey’ and ‘Ode, Intimations of Immortality’ – as foundations to the selection as a whole, around which are clustered further sonnets and lyrics by Wordsworth, some well known, others rarely seen. Jan will also contribute a note on the poems and a reflection on her reasons for creating the book. Please refer to the page about An Eye Made Quiet in this section of the website.

A Scanty Plot of Ground

A further venture into the canon of English poetry is planned for publication in 2025. A Scanty Plot of Ground will be a compilation of sonnets by two of the greatest proponents of the form in English: John Donne (?1572-1631) and Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-89). Donne will be represented by a selection from his sequence of ‘Holy Sonnets’ – of which the best known is ‘Death be not proud’. Hopkins’ selection will include about twenty sonnets ranging from ‘The Windhover’ and ‘Felix Randall’ to his six so-called ‘Terrible Sonnets’.

Those who know anything about these two men will see the connections, and the reason for our including them together in one book: both were priests – Donne an Anglican, and Dean of St Paul’s in London; Hopkins a Jesuit, ordained later in his brief life, a curate and a teacher. Both were troubled by a sense of conflict between their love of beauty and its pleasures and the denial required by their vocations. Both wrote poems celebrating life in its fullest sense, but published few poems during their lifetime. Donne wrote openly witty, erotic, and sensual love poems which nevertheless made metaphorical connections to the divine, as well as many ‘divine poems’ such as the ‘Holy Sonnets’ on matters of the spirit. His poems have been praised and cherished ever since their first appearances, collected in many editions after his death. Hopkins wrote poems in praise of God couched in some of the most exalted and sensual celebrations of nature’s beauty in the language, but was forbidden by the Jesuit order to publish them during his lifetime: his poems first appeared in a collection edited by his friend, the poet Robert Bridges, in 1918. The book had a stunning impact. Dead for thirty years when the poems appeared, Hopkins was hailed as the first great modernist in English poetry. His influence has been profound.

The combined selections of their sonnets will provide revealing portraits of both poets, and at the same time will offer an opportunity to consider the sonnet itself as a central form in poetry in English. The book will include biographical notes on both poets and an afterword on the history of the sonnet, its formal functions, and a discussion of its importance.

Abigail Rorer is the creator of her own exquisite editions from her Lone Oak Press, as well as being the subject of Endgrain Editions Two, illustrator of our edition of Amours de Voyage, and contributor to The Marriage of True Minds. To our delight, Abbie has agreed to engrave portraits of Donne and Hopkins for A Scanty Plot of Ground. We hope for publication in the mid summer of 2025.

. . . and more . . .

Other projects are in the planning stages, but at this point we have only limited information about them. Nevertheless, here is a taste of three of them:

The Art of Eric Bergman

We have firm plans with the family of Eric Bergman, the brilliant German- Canadian engraver and block-printmaker of the early to mid-20th century, to publish a major book on his work, which we have long admired. This will include over 80 engravings printed from the original blocks, which have been carefully preserved by his grand-daughters, Karen Paul and Norma Bergman. Eric Bergman was a close friend of the painter and printmaker W. J. Phillips, who is well known as an engraver, but who is also credited with introducing the Japanese-style colour woodcut into the Canadian art scene between the wars. Bergman learned this technique from Phillips, and as well as his extant engravings, printed from the blocks, our book will include a number of examples of his colour woodcuts. Some will be reproductions, but a few of these will be newly printed from inks applied with brushes to blocks and hand-rubbed in the Ukiyo-e style. This specialized work will be undertaken by Edith Krause – whose enchanting woodcuts in An Avian Alphabet (see Books in Print) will be familiar to our subscribers. Edith studied Ukiyo-e printing as a student, and is eager to return to the form.
Karen Paul and Norma Bergman have written a biographical essay on their grandfather, and a critical appraisal of Bergman’s work has been provided by Art Historian and retired Canadian Senator Patricia Bovey – former Curator and Director of the Winnipeg Art Gallery, Director of the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria, and past member of the Board of Trustees of the National Gallery of Canada. The book will include photographs and reproduced plates of other works. Discussions and plans for this are ongoing, and it will go into the press immediately following the publication of Bordering on the Sublime.

The Shepherd’s Calendar

We have long wanted to publish an edition of John Clare’s The Shepherd’s Calendar, to be illustrated with engravings by Andy English. Andy has a lifelong love of this jewel of pastoral and romantic poetry, and the project has been the subject of many conversations over the past ten years. We now hope to have this book in the press by mid-2026, but at the moment we have no more details to offer.

Ovid – Englished by Arthur Golding

And of course – beyond all these there looms, tantalizingly, our planned edition of Ovid’s Metamorphoses in the 1567 ‘Englishing’ of Arthur Golding, with engravings by Peter Lazarov, about which we – and Peter – are very excited. If all goes as planned, this will be another major work in at least two volumes. The text is fascinating, written in high style in ‘fourteeners’ – that is, rhyming couplets of heptameter, a favourite largely pre-Shakespearean meter. As fourteeners are difficult for a modern reader to sound out without galumphing, Crispin will provide a note on ‘Reading Golding’ which will, we believe, ease the unfamiliar readers into an easier reading of the text. There will also be an introduction about Arthur Golding and the text of his ‘Englishing’ and its history.

We have had several conversations with Peter Lazarov about the illustrations, and anticipate extraordinary results.

We will continue to post news of various ongoing developments here, with the hope that something irresistible will catch the unsuspecting eye.