Monday, June 11, 2012

"please retain the deckles"

or, something like that, said to have been said by William Morris to a binder who, in turn, chopped off the deckles and kept them nicely in a separate packet to return to Mr Morris - so, if what's good enough for him is good enough for me, here are the deckles !  -  actually, I cut them off because, in the next book I'm printing, most of the material on the rectos is the same, and if I kept the outer deckle on the sheet I'd have to reset the form on the press each time I wanted to print on the other side of the sheet - but with straight edges on both sides of the sheets, I can simply flop the sheet over to print on the other side. . . in any case, it's a nice opportunity for me to announce, however slyly, that there's another book coming up and that the paper is (some) vintage Barcham Green India Office, and (some) Ruscombe Mill India Office - I've had the Barcham Green now for some 20 to 25 years, and have used it just once in the special edition of New Zealand poet Kendrick Smithyman's poem Tomorata at the Holloway Press at the University of Auckland back in 1996 - anyway, behold ! the deckles -