In this section you will find information about upcoming titles to be published within the next year. Of these, the long-awaited and most important book is certainly The Play of Pericles, an edition of Shakespeare’s romance, ongoing now at the press for several years. Work on the text, edited by Crispin Elsted, occupied more than five years; preliminary discussions with Simon Brett about the illustrations went on over a period of eighteen months – and these continue, almost page by page, as he works on the engravings. We anticipate Pericles being our most beautiful book to date. The publication has been shunted forward by three years or more since we first announced it, as other work and health issues have required both us at the press and Simon Brett in England to put the project aside for periods of time, but we now plan to complete the book before the end of 2009 (D.V.).  

It will include extensive notes and a major essay on the play in a separate volume. The edition will be only 116 copies: 100 standard and 16 deluxe. The Deluxe copies will have a specially designed binding and a suite of a selection of the engravings for framing. 4 of the deluxe are hors commerce and the remaining 12 are now reserved, but if you are interested we can put your name on a waiting list and notify you if one becomes available. Of the 100 standard copies, over seventy-five, including those for subscribers and patrons of the press, are now reserved. An early reservation is advised. Verbum sat sapienti.

Other publications, some of which have been delayed as well because of scheduling with Pericles, include Pictures & Stories [Endgrain Editions Four], a major overview of the renowned American engraver Gaylord Schanilec’s colour engravings, which will be interspersed with the artist's own narratives about their inspiration and the processes of their creation. This book will now be printed in the spring and summer of 2010, and we anticipate that the book will be published in the winter of 2010/11. (Remember that subscribers to Endgrain Editions will receive their 20% series discount on this volume.)

While Pericles is continuing on his picaresque way, we are planning a Summer 2009 publication of a volume of poems by Tim Bowling, an award-winning Canadian poet and novelist whose work we have admired for some years. His second book of poems, Dying Scarlet (which won the Stephansson Award for Poetry in 1998), remains for us one of the most intelligent and sensitive collections published in this country, and The Paperboy’s Winter is a small masterpiece in the sometimes all-too-familiar genre of the coming-of-age novel.

Tim Bowling has published seven collections of poetry, among them Darkness and Silence (winner of the Canadian Authors Association Award for Poetry), The Witness Ghost, and The Memory Orchard (both nominated for the Governor General’s Literary Award). He is also the author of three novels, Downriver Drift (Harbour), The Paperboy’s Winter (Penguin) and The Bone Sharps (Gaspereau Press), and a poignant and beautiful memoir, The Lost Coast: Salmon, Memory and the Death of Wild Culture. He has won the Petra Kenney International Poetry Prize, the National Poetry Award, and the Orillia International Poetry Prize. Raised in Ladner, not far from the press in the Fraser Valley of British Columbia, he now lives in Edmonton.

The collection we will publish, Between Rainfalls, will comprise about twenty new poems, many of them evoking the Fraser Valley and the west coast of British Columbia. Tim Bowling is a poet well worth meeting, and we hope this book will introduce him to a wider and more international audience.

Other projects are being contemplated in various areas, including subsequent additions to Endgrain Editions and an edition of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night. As things progress and books are completed, we will bring you news of other projects which we hope you will find pleasing, stimulating — and of course irresistible!