We must continue to point out that 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 (certainly editorially) 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.

On the left you will see links to separate pages with brief descriptions of some of the books that we look forward to publishing in the coming months and years. Each page contains details on a specific title; we expect to update and refine these details as our work progresses on each book, so do check back from time to time. Bordering on the Sublime in particular is close to completion, and the page for that title contains our latest status report.

Pamphlets and Chapbooks

In the September 2024 installment of Press News we broached our plans to produce some pamphlets and chapbooks – smaller projects that would allow readers who were nervous about jumping into the fine press market to explore its possibilities at lower costs than usual. We had already begun this process by restarting the Wayzgoose Pamphlets in 2022 and 2023 with a reprint of the original 1984 Wayzgoose Pamphlet One on handpresses, and a second pamphlet on Dingbats. A third title on the types of Jan van Krimpen is under way, and further titles are planned.

In the fall of 2024 we re-launched yet another earlier pamphlet series, Loose Canons, with Wild Peaches: Poems of Elinor Wylie, first published in 2014. This second edition is expanded to include eighteen of Wylie’s poems, trebling the six poems in the original edition. This title is to be joined by the second pamphlet in the series, Ben Jonson Entertains a Man from Stratford, & other poems by E A Robinson. Both these pamphlets will be published in February, 2025. [See the page for Loose Canons in Books in Print.] Further titles in the series are planned. Poets being considered for inclusion include Merrill Moore, Edward Thomas, Gertrude Stein, W H Davies, Roy Daniells, Humbert Wolfe, and Archibald Lampman. We may also include some poets in translation from other languages.

Preparations continue for the opening titles in Well Told Tales, our forthcoming series of chapbooks, which will offer short stories by past writers of the form whose work is acknowledged as exemplary. We expect that the first of these will be Katherine Mansfield’s ‘The Garden Party’, and the second, Anton Chekhov’s ‘The Lady with the Little Dog’, in a new translation by Alex Sizov and Crispin Elsted.

Both of these stories, in common with every title of the series as it unfolds, will feature a commissioned frontispiece drawing. We are hoping to interest art students and young artists in illustration, and we are presently searching for possible contributors. It is essential that these be line drawings capable of reproduction with photopolymer plates – ideally using ink or dark pencil as a medium. We welcome suggestions about possible artists from anyone who may be, or may know of, a possible candidate for consideration. A modest fee will be paid to artists whose work is used, and they will also receive copies of the chapbook in which their work appears.

Beyond this, the ‘preparations’ include our familiarizing ourselves with Affinity, a digital typesetting program which comes well recommended for our purposes. Since Crispin views such technologies as dangerously reckless, he is relying on Apollonia and Lea to guide him through the digital labyrinth so that he (and of course both of them as well) can become proficient in its use. The nature of such programs, fortunately, will allow us to buy in well drawn digital fonts of typefaces we already use in metal – for example, Bembo, Joanna, Van Dijck, and Poliphilus – for our initial forays into the method. Thereafter we may very well spread our wings a little, as there are certainly some excellent typefaces which exist only in digital form, and as St. Marher reminds us, ‘time and tide wait for no man.’

Please don't hesitate to contact us with your expressions of interest in specific titles, and with words of encouragement. We will continue to post news of various ongoing developments here, with the hope that something irresistible will catch the unsuspecting eye.