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A podcast about the art and science of making books. Arthur Attwell speaks to book-making leaders about design, production, marketing, distribution, and technology. These are conversations for book lovers and publishing decision makers, whether you’re crafting books at a big company or a boutique publisher.
Hello, and welcome to How Books Are Made, a podcast about the art and science of making books. I'm Arthur Atwill.
Speaker 2:The world of bookmaking is a big old tree. It has branches for all kinds of things, like paperback fiction, textbooks, ebooks, marketing, and metadata. And with every technological advance, it grows branches on those branches. And if you trace them back, branch by branch, all the way to the trunk of that big old tree and down groundwoods, you'll find a person standing at a hand powered printer, pressing ink into paper. Now it's in the nature of all that technological progress that with every advancement, we shave off a little of the art and ingenuity we once invested in book making, in the service of efficiency or scale.
Speaker 2:And that's okay. But thankfully, somewhere someone remembers the art and can show it to us. And when you hold a book that's been typeset in metal, printed by hand on fine paper, Bound and sewn with board and cloth. You realize with a whoosh just how much art we've shaved off in the last 100 years. And how much there is to enjoy and admire there.
Speaker 2:In this episode, I speak with Graham Moss, the founder of Incline Press in Oldham, near Manchester in England. Incline Press works with poets and artists to make limited edition books with handset metal type on vintage machines. You really must visit the links in our show notes to see it for yourself. And if you're near Liverpool when this comes out in October 2024, well, keep listening to find out. Graeme, it is such a pleasure to be talking to you today.
Speaker 2:Thank you for joining me.
Speaker 3:Thank you. Pleasure to be here.
Speaker 2:One of the joys of the podcast is that I get to do all kinds of research about my guests beforehand, and I believe that you were once a history teacher.
Speaker 3:I indeed was, yes, yes. And And in a way, it never stops.
Speaker 2:Absolutely. I was thinking about the printing work you do now, and in many ways, you're still a history teacher. How did you find your way from teaching history to starting a press?
Speaker 3:I don't know if you remember. There was a politician in this country called Margaret Thatcher, And she got involved in education and started changing the school curriculum to suit what she thought of as a national agenda. And I'm not any sort of a nationalist, and I really feel that teachers as professionals are the people who should determine the syllabus that's taught in schools. And I believe this so strongly that when she started changing the regime of the education system, I thought I need to find something else to do. So for the 1st few years, while while these changes were going on, I'm strongly in opposition to it and made my views, known to everybody.
Speaker 3:But it was apparent that the conservative government wasn't gonna change what they intended to do, so I looked around something else to do. And, essentially, I taught myself bookbinding.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 3:Although I had printed back in the 19 sixties and and worked for 4 years in a place where I learned about letterpress printing, I really restarted as a bookbinder, and then realized that I needed a printing press to successfully bind some of the books I was repairing. I'm a vegetarian, so I'm not interested in leather bindings and that kind of fancy work. So I specialized in repairing books that were clothbound in the early days of cloth binding, which is really the 18, 20, thirties, and forties, which coincides with a period where, bookbinding was industrialized because there was a growing amount of adult literacy. And so more books were being produced, more books were being sold to meet the market demands, invented all sorts of machinery that could do the jobs that had previously done by hand. Well, I went back to the previously done by hand and was cloth binding books.
Speaker 2:Fantastic. I've not really found a a good phrase that I think most people would understand for the kind of book printing you do today, but I suppose I would use words like artisanal, vintage, and handset. How do you describe what you do to someone who doesn't know much about printing?
Speaker 3:Well, all of those, but it all of those three words that you used. The thing is, in this country, artisan is not used very often in its strict sense, which I take to be that it's work done by the person who owns the tools, the work is done with. So and we don't use it much. So artisanal? No.
Speaker 3:But I think it has to be an explanation. I think I have to say I work by hand.
Speaker 2:Right.
Speaker 3:My printing is pre computer. I have nothing to do with using a computer in the work itself. I use one
Speaker 2:for communication.
Speaker 3:It is possible to use a computer to typeset and then to get polymer plates made and then to print from those polymer plates on the equipment that I use. But I tend not to do that because I'm as much interested in maintaining the whole craft. And typesetting is part of that craft. Typecasting is part of that craft. So I don't bother with polymer plates at all, except occasionally for illustrations if I need copies of old wood engravings rather than employing somebody to copy them, which must be pretty soul destroying work.
Speaker 3:I much prefer to get a polymer plate made from an original print and then to use that myself as an illustration in something that I'm printing. But that's rare that I do that. I prefer I prefer to stick with modern illustrators and do the whole thing using the proper processes.
Speaker 2:Lovely. I've really loved looking through all the books you created, or the ones I could find online, along with countless leaflets and posters and bookmarks, and they're beautiful, sometimes funny. How much of your work is commissioned by clients, and how much are you focused on creating the books that Incline Press publishes themselves?
Speaker 3:Nothing is commissioned by clients. I don't have clients. All of my work is self started.
Speaker 2:Wonderful.
Speaker 3:I only produce books and ephemera that amuses me, that interests me. By amusement, I don't mean falling about laughing like a clown, but things that engage me intellectually. Occasionally, people do suggest things, and I say, oh, yeah. Let's run with that. But I am in control.
Speaker 3:Nobody comes to me and says, I will pay you money to produce this book for me. In other words, I am not a printer for hire. We used to call that jobbing work.
Speaker 2:Right.
Speaker 3:And I am not a jobbing printer. In other words, I don't do jobs for other people. Now that's not always true because sometimes friends of mine come to me and say, can you do me a leaflet for this, that, or the other? Because they're a friend of mine, I will do it. But then I tend not to charge.
Speaker 3:So for instance, I've, you know, I've got a few CDs that I've done the case covers for, and that records, LP records, the old style. And I do that for friends. I'm not going out looking for somebody to pay me to do something that they want me to do. I'm doing what I want to do.
Speaker 2:I'm so glad to hear it because so often, artists have to kind of make a living by doing the client work, and their own work has to take a back seat. So it's fantastic to hear that you've managed to do it.
Speaker 3:I've recently been given, a little tiny printing block of a griffin that was originally a wood engraving by Eric Ravilius. Now Eric Eric Ravilius is, highly regarded as a 19 thirties artist and latterly as a war artist. And in fact, he went missing in action during the 2nd World War. This little griffin that I've been given is an example of commercial work that he did in between other jobs, and he was employed by the Southern Railway in England to produce a logo that they would use on all of their advertising material.
Speaker 2:Fabulous. I'd love to try to give our listener a picture of what a mechanical press looks like, and what it's doing, and we'll certainly link to some videos in the show notes. I suppose I would describe it as fundamentally a machine that's pressing a metal shape, or a wooden shape, but usually a metal shape onto a sheet of paper over and over again, and you are swapping in a new sheet of paper every few seconds. That's a lay person watching a video describing what's going on. How do you describe what's happening in the machine and that dance, really, between the machine and the operator?
Speaker 3:You have to see it to believe it. Let's just just talk about a platen press. So let's go back to Gutenberg and just say he invented a machine or developed a machine that was capable of taking the top surface of an image, and that top surface had ink put on it and was pressed onto paper. So that is what letterpress printing is, is pressing the two things together so that the ink is transferred from the image to the paper itself. So my job as a letterpress printer is to use a machine that was new in the 18 sixties.
Speaker 3:So that's, 400 years Wow. To get to that point. And that point is one at which an operator can use a foot treadle and make the equivalent of 6 steps. And in making the equivalent of 6 steps, in other words, the foot goes up and down 6 times, produces one print. But that print is a whole sheet of paper that's covered with the type that we look at today.
Speaker 3:In other words, the lettering, the page in the book. So what I have to do is I have to take all those individual letters, which all have to be exactly the same height, put them all together with white space in between where word breaks occur, white space at the end of the line so that there's white space between the line you've just typed set and the next line that follows it. Fill a page with that. So in other words, if you just open any old paperback book, what you're looking at is the end result of what I do. But the way I do it, instead of doing it by computer on screen and pressing buttons here and there, is much more physical.
Speaker 3:So it's all done by picking up little pieces of metal and putting them together. They are locked into a metal chase, which is a rectangular frame, like a picture frame, if you like, using little wedges called coins. And a coin is simply a wedge. There is a mechanical version which we use nowadays, but they used to be little wooden wedges that worked against each other. So when you tightened up the whole thing inside that metal chase, nothing fell out when you picked it up because if it did and all fell on the floor, you'd have to start completely from scratch, and there's a day's work wasted or lost.
Speaker 3:Okay. So that chase is put inside the printing press in the bed of the press, which is language we're still using language that was used in Germany in 14 fifties.
Speaker 2:Wow.
Speaker 3:The platen is the thing that presses the paper against the type. So on a modern treadle press, rollers come down from an inking disk and put ink just on the top surface of those individual metal letters. At the same time, into the platen, I pick up a piece of fresh clean paper from my right hand, put it into the platen, and it just rests there. Then the platen comes forward, and at the same time, the metal chase comes forward so that the 2 meet and pressed again. There is a cam inside the driving wheel that pauses the process at that point.
Speaker 3:So the ink transfer gets a little bit of extra time to achieve itself. Then it begins to open again. And while all this is going on, my foot is still going up and down, up and down. Right. So when it opens, as it opens, I've picked up with my right hand the fresh piece of paper.
Speaker 3:I've taken the printed piece of paper out with my left hand, put the fresh paper in, and put the printed paper in a receptacle to my left.
Speaker 2:Amazing.
Speaker 3:Now most of my editions are only like 200, 250 copies. Let's just say that takes half an hour to produce, but it takes about 5 hours to make the chase up. In other words, most of the work goes into the typesetting.
Speaker 2:If the person listening to us can, they should pause, go watch the video, and then come back and keep listening to us. I watched several lovely videos of presses at work, and certainly the most mesmerizing for me was the Arab press. That sound, if anyone has ever painted a wall with a roller, and you get that breathing sound that the ink makes as it rolls onto the surface, the AeroPress has the similar sort of breathing sound as it works. I know that your AeroPress in particular has its own story, its own history. What is special about the Arab Press in general and yours in particular?
Speaker 3:Let's start with Phineas Gordon. Phineas Gordon is an American inventor who invented several types of printing press. This particular clamshell platen is is one of them. He said Benjamin Franklin came to him in a dream with this idea of how to produce this dwell on the press, which was pretty good because Ben Franklin had been dead for about 50 years. He sold patent rights where he could around the world because he wanted to make his money, not as a printer, but as an inventor.
Speaker 3:And he sold patent rights to a fellow in Halifax in England called, Josiah Wade. And Josiah Wade made a few more improvements himself and produced the Arab printing press. He called it an Arab because, what are we talking about? About 18/72, 73, 74, that period. And Arabs had the reputation of being consistent hard workers who would stay at the job until it was done.
Speaker 2:Interesting.
Speaker 3:If you like, it's a positive explanation of what the press is capable of doing. They carried on producing these presses with very few alterations. They carried on making them until 19 fifties, and they were still being made up to that date. But what they never did was produce a feeder, something that would pick the paper up and put the paper in. And this is probably why in the 19 fifties, they lost traction because there were machines being invented in this country that produced much faster work.
Speaker 3:My particular machine was bought new in 1906 by the father of the widow of the man from whom I bought it. Mister Taber was a working printer. When he retired, he moved to a small northern town in England called Norwich, and it's his press that I've got.
Speaker 2:Fabulous.
Speaker 3:It's a wonderful machine. It's been well looked after. There are no ball bearings in these machines whatsoever. But as long as you keep oiling and well, first job has to be oil the machine. All of the bearings or all the metal that works on metal will work perfectly.
Speaker 3:And so this particular machine has been well oiled throughout its entire working life. There's no play involved at all. It's a wonderful thing, and I I enjoy it.
Speaker 2:It's a beauty to watch. You also have another machine that I'm very curious about, and that's the Ludlow type caster. What is a Ludlow type caster?
Speaker 3:Typecasting is is a profession in its own right. The most popular machine that was ever used for casting type, there were 2 really, the monotype machine and the liner type machine. And the monotype machine produces individual letters, hence, monotype. And the linotype machine produces a metal slug, which is a line of type. Now the problem with the linotype machine from my point of view is you can't make corrections.
Speaker 3:You've gotta reset the whole line. Whereas with a monotype machine, you can make individual letter corrections. So if you've got an a upside down, you can turn it around the right way. Now the beauty of a Ludlow machine is that you use brass matrices to set the line of type. You can then correct those brass matrices, put them into the Ludlow type caster, pull the right levers, press the right buttons, and you get a metal slug that is the correct typesetting.
Speaker 2:Am I right that matrices are essentially molds into which lead is poured to form the letter shape that will be used in the printer?
Speaker 3:Exactly that.
Speaker 2:Amazing. I also wanted to know more about the papers you're printing on, many of which I believe are handmade papers. Who and where are your favorite paper makers?
Speaker 3:The important part of paper, as far as I am concerned, is that the ink transfers well to the paper. So you you get a nice printed job at the end of it. The best paper for that purpose has for a very long time been a German manufacturer called Zirkel. But unfortunately, a couple of years ago, there was a a massive flood, and the entire paper mill was washed away.
Speaker 2:Wow.
Speaker 3:And the large conglomerate that owned the paper mill decided that they weren't gonna replace it all. So we'd be having to look for replacement papers for Zirkel. And I've got a very good paper merchant in London by the name of John Purcell, and he's managed to find an English paper maker who is making an equivalent paper to the original Zirkel. So that will always be my first paper to turn to. Now handmade paper is difficult to print on.
Speaker 3:Right. It requires all sorts of extra work to get a good impression. There are 2 papermakers left in this country that are capable of producing in large quantities, and I use one called 2 Rivers, which is at Watchet in Somerset. And I've been buying paper off this chap since the, well, middle of 19 nineties, and he will make paper to order. So I leave the technical side of it entirely to him, And I say, I want it for this job, and I want to do this particular thing with it.
Speaker 3:And I need a sheet of this size, and then I leave it to him. And he will send me half a dozen sheets of what he thinks is is what I want. And then we talk about whether or not it is suitable. And so far, he's never let me down.
Speaker 2:Fabulous.
Speaker 3:I'm sticking with this guy. He's called, Jim Pattinson. He employs a couple of young people. He's trying to pass on the skills of the trade.
Speaker 2:Lovely.
Speaker 3:Same with bookbinding. Often, I bind the books myself. But if I get books bound out of house, then I'm looking for someone who's gonna pass the skills on to the next generation of bookbinding. And I've been lucky.
Speaker 2:Fantastic. I wanted to talk about 2 particular books that you've created. The first of those is a book called New Borders, the Working Life of Elizabeth Friedlander, written by Pauline Parker. How did that book come to be, and who was Elizabeth Friedlander?
Speaker 3:Who was she indeed? I'll go back to the 19 nineties again when I began to buy patent paper. Now patent paper sheets, they're about 50 by 70 centimeters. They're usually printed by offset Liza. They fascinate me because of the color, the beauty, the repeat patterns.
Speaker 3:They're perfect for bookbinding. I was buying old Kirwan Press patent papers. Now Kirwan Press went bankrupt in the 19 eighties, and it turned out that, John Purcell paper, my paper merchant in London, had gone to the bankruptcy sale and had bought huge quantities from their stockroom. And nobody else was buying them from him, which surprised me at the time. Although the, V and A Museum and and such like places were selling them at £10 a sheet as artworks because some of the people who produce these patent papers, like Graham Sutherland, went on to become very famous artists.
Speaker 3:Elizabeth Friedlander didn't go on to become a famous artist. Elizabeth Friedlander was born in Berlin, Charlottenburg in 1903. And by the late 19 twenties was going to art school in Berlin. She was tutored by a German book designer called Emil Rudolf Weisz. And I think, really, she learned more from him that you can trace through her entire work in life than she could have done from anybody else.
Speaker 3:At the time, Weisz was, probably the foremost book designer in Germany. If you wanted a book designing by Emil Rudolf Weisz, he would design the typeface. He would design the binding. He would see the whole thing through from beginning to end, which is more or less what he would do. Friedlander learned from him.
Speaker 3:I suspect that he probably got her her first job, and, certainly, he knew the proprietor of the Bauer type foundry, a a man called Georg Hartman. And Hartman employed her to produce a typeface for the Bauer type foundry. The proof of that typeface weren't ready till about 1936, 37, by which time the Nazis were in power. She received the document that said that as a Jewish person, she wasn't fit to promulgate German culture. She then left the country and went to work in Italy for an Italian publishing house called Mondadori.
Speaker 3:Mondadori himself was a a personal friend of Mussolini and was a a fascist, but he wasn't an anti semite. The anti semitic laws in Italy, which, were to follow a couple of years later, though they were more harsh, in fact, than the anti Semitic laws in Germany, it was, not easy for the Italian government to make sure that all the lay laws were obeyed. So she carried on working there until 1939 when she got a permit to come to England, and the only permits that were available for Jewish people to come to England at the time were to come as domestic servants. So she was sponsored by a Quaker family in North London. She got one of 50 of these permits that were available.
Speaker 3:And she came to England in September of 1939, just before the war started, and was able to learn English whilst working for this Quaker family in North London. And eventually, around about 1940, 41, she went in to see a chap called Frances Menel. Now Frances Menel had been a publisher of Nonsuch Press Books and was renowned, really, for someone who understood books and how books are made and what they should look like. She went to him and showed him her portfolio of work, and he said, but, of course, he said, I know you. I know your face.
Speaker 3:But I wish you meant her typeface. Our type foundry in Germany had changed the name of the typeface from Friedlander, which was what it was originally to be called. But because it was a recognizably Jewish name, they called it instead Elizabeth. And so the Elizabeth typeface, when it came out in 1938, was picked up by the typographic magazines in London. And Francis Menel and, Robert Harling together, I think, wrote an article about the typeface in which they praised its great beauty.
Speaker 3:The only people I found in England who purchased any was at Under Culture Printing, but it is absolutely delightful. You can see how it's grown from the typeface that Emil Rudolf Weiss designed. She was a wonderful calligrapher, and it's a very calligraphic type. Flat serifs. They're not serifs.
Speaker 3:You see, serifs on letters come from 2 places. They either come from the chisel of the person who's cut it in stone, or they've come from the pen of the calligrapher.
Speaker 2:Right.
Speaker 3:All of her serifs are very calligraphic. They are drawn with a pen, and you can see that. It's, very inspiring typeface. It's very beautiful.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:She got to London. He then I gave her a job. He worked for an advertising agency called Crawford's. And so he gave her lots of advertising work that she could do. But at the same time, he found a job for her working in Bush House in London for a black propaganda unit, which is a unit that was run by a typographer called Elik Howe.
Speaker 3:And it existed to produce German language propaganda that looked like it had been produced by the Germans.
Speaker 2:Wow.
Speaker 3:And this is the sort of stuff that was dropped from RAF planes over Germany and occupied France during the 2nd World War. And she was involved with that right right through the war. And at the end of the war, she finally got her permission. She'd applied for permission to emigrate to the United States. And in fact, the 2 people who signed her papers were Noel Coward, the playwright
Speaker 2:So what?
Speaker 3:And Toscanini, the, conductor.
Speaker 2:Wow.
Speaker 3:She then decided when when her permit came through, she decided change her mind, and and the letter exists in which she says, I think my war work is too important for me to leave the country now. So she stayed in England. At the end of the second World War, Penguin Books employed a man called Yanti Schuld to redesign their work, and Yanti Schuld knew her face. And so he employed her to do work for Penguin. He carried on giving her work until her eyesight started to fail.
Speaker 3:Oh. And then she left England, left London, and went to live on the West Coast of Ireland at Cork, where she was a close friend of a man called Alessandro Magary McMahon. He he was an Italian antifascist who she'd met in London. He worked for the BBC during the war years. He was a deep sea fisherman, and she designed logos for the deep sea fisherman's rock club.
Speaker 3:And
Speaker 2:Amazing.
Speaker 3:The story itself is absolutely fantastic. What happened with me was that I found some pen and paper she designed. Then I first heard her name from a woman called Tanya Schmoller, who had also worked at Penguin. Tanya Schmoller introduced me to several other people who gave me more information, and I thought I would be able to produce a little 16 page pamphlet about Elizabeth Friedlander's patent papers. But then talking to a friend of mine who worked in a paper store in Manchester, which is the nearest big city to Oldham, He said, oh, well, there's a chap who's just come in to do a postgraduate degree in book design, and he's heard of Elizabeth Friedlander.
Speaker 3:So I got in touch with him, and he put me in touch with Pauline Palka. Pauline, who writes like an angel, produced the text.
Speaker 2:Wonderful.
Speaker 3:She was able to produce the text because she had access to the entire Friedlander archive, including the sketchbooks that she'd kept from 1928 onwards, all the work that she'd done as a calligrapher, roughs that she'd done for Mondadori, work that she'd done not only in Germany, but work in Italy and work in this country, and also the work that she did while she was over in Ireland, ostensibly retired. It's a beautiful book, and nobody had heard of Elizabeth Friedlander. She really was forgotten. I'm glad to say we we've reached a point now where I want to get another pamphlet in print about Elizabeth Friedlander just to keep the, approach to her available to anybody who wants to know. The University of Victoria in Canada has put the whole book online so the book can be read.
Speaker 3:Frances Menel's granddaughter, who's a artist in London called Catherine Menel, saw a copy of New Borders at the St. Bride's library in London, got in touch with me. I put her in touch with Pauline. Pauline put her in touch with the University of Cork where the entire archive now rests. And Katherine made a a lovely little short film about Elizabeth Friedlander, so that's available as well.
Speaker 3:I don't think anybody would have known any of this if we hadn't done the book. And I think it's probably the best thing we've ever done. Not only as a good book, but to bring to life somebody who was dead, gone, and forgotten.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Just fantastic. Yeah. Of the many pieces of your work I looked at, I think perhaps the most moving and beautiful was Memento Mori, Memento Vivere, the book you created to celebrate the life of the late Kathleen Whelan, your partner in life and business for many years. And I'll also include some links to some lovely videos about the book in the show notes.
Speaker 2:Can you tell me more about that book and how you created it?
Speaker 3:It's very, very difficult because it's an emotional book. It's actually it's interesting thinking about it now. It's the same as with Elizabeth Friedlander. People shouldn't be forgotten. Really, that's what memento Mori is about.
Speaker 3:I mean, Cathy wasn't as public a figure as Elizabeth Friedlander was in her own time. She was a a library worker, cataloger, librarian, worked at, Bryn Mawr College outside Philadelphia. After we met, she came over and worked here, firstly, at Chettam's Library, which is the oldest public library in this country, laterally, at the Bodleian on a, cataloging project. And then back, she came back to work at Chettam's Library again. She got breast cancer, went into remission.
Speaker 3:She had about another 5 years before it returned, eventually got to her brain and and killed her. So I just wanted to produce something that showed her life as a as a library worker, as someone who's interested in books, as someone who's interested in literature, little bits of things that we did together. I don't think anyone's done a book quite like it in terms of its design, and that was an important part of the book. So there's an introduction. Listen, about a dozen friends of ours, mutual friends who who died in more or less the same 8 year period.
Speaker 2:Wow.
Speaker 3:And that is followed with about 4 or 5 pages about Kathy's life. And then there are 50 or so pages where if you open the book on the left hand side, you've got a column of type and a story, and facing it is a tipped in plate of something that is associated with the story I've told on the facing page. So every opening of the book is like a chapter in itself.
Speaker 2:It's, really something. In Memento Mori, you tell a lovely story about how you and Cathy, I believe, worked with Ed Reha at Swamp Press Letter Foundry to cast a set of initial letters that Elizabeth Friedlander had designed, noting how much it meant to Cathy to see Friedlander's type being used. What was that like?
Speaker 3:They it was really quite amazing. Friedlander had produced she'd been commissioned by Castle, the London publisher, to produce a set of initials to open a chapter in Winston Churchill's history of the second World War. Oh, wow. This is back in 19 fifties. Therefore, the first edition uses these Friedlander initials.
Speaker 3:They were never produced as metal type, and you can see by looking at the book that there's ink replicas of her original calligraphy. But in the archive that, Pauline Palka worked with was the full alphabet, which, of course, the book didn't use. You know, there there are no chapter openings that need a capital x, but but the full alphabet was was done by Friedlander. She was that kind of a worker. So I got a proof of that and sent that proof to Adria.
Speaker 3:The whole idea was that we should be able to not only produce that as a type, but to call it Friedlander rather than to call it Elizabeth. Give her back her name. That that was Kathy's expression, and therefore, the typeface, they're called Friedlander initials. And, the full set is still available from Ed Reyers' Swamp Press.
Speaker 2:Fantastic.
Speaker 3:We produce a new year book every year at Incline Press that we send to people who commit to buying a single copy of every book that we produce. I am using the capital j from the Friedlander initials in the book.
Speaker 2:Lovely.
Speaker 3:They're living letters, and they're not available digitally.
Speaker 2:Even more special. I discovered quite late in my research that, recently you were married to the artist Helen Moss, or Helen now Moss, and that you work together now. And I've felt like I'd got to the happy ending of a roller coaster of a love story. I believe Helen is working on a new book called Mary, and that it's part of the Liverpool Book Art Show at the Liverpool Central Library this October, which is pretty much when this episode comes out. I hope that people can go along and see it.
Speaker 2:Where else might we see more of your and Helen's work, and what's coming next?
Speaker 3:I think the first book that we did together that was, totally a joint production, was an edition of Punch and Judy. Helen using an Albion hand press. So that's going back to this type of printing press that was invented all around about 1800 made out of cast iron, but it's a hand press in exactly the same way as Gutenberg's presses, were hand presses, except it's made of cast iron. It's a very sensitive machine. I think for engravers, it's a more sympathetic machine when it comes to printing engravings than a treadle press or or any of the electrical versions of of powered printing presses that have come since.
Speaker 3:So she used our Albion, dated from 1846, to produce multicolor cuts of all the characters in the Punch and Judy play. We took the only Punch and Judy script that that was written down right at the end of 18th century. It wasn't published until about the 18 twenties. What do we know? We know that Pepys saw Punching Judy, so we know it was around in 16 sixties.
Speaker 3:But we've, no real knowledge of what the Punching Judy play was. And we've got plenty of information from the later 19th century and the 20th century about how the Punch and Judy plays developed. But, this is the first one, and we found a script of all the text of a life story told to Mayhew in the 18 fifties Wow. Of a puncher duty man, and how it how the job was actually carried out on the streets of London. So we put these 2 together.
Speaker 3:Helen did 15, 5, and 6 color cuts of all the characters in the Punch and Judy plays, and so that was our first book together. We we produced that earlier this year. She's working mostly on her own art. I consider myself to be an artisan, but Helen is very much an artist. And so she's an engraver.
Speaker 3:She'll engrave anything. She'll engrave with, wood, linoleum, acrylic. But she's working on this book, Mary, which is based around photographs of people who have been damaged by the war that's going on in Gaza at the moment. That is the background to the book, not the war itself, but the suffering of the people who are involved in it. That's the one that's on on display in Liverpool.
Speaker 2:What a team. It's, been an absolute joy getting to know your work. I really appreciate it. I hope I get to see lots more. And thank you again so much for spending this time with me.
Speaker 3:You're welcome. It's it's been a pleasure. Thank you.
Speaker 2:This episode was edited by Helen Nauru and researched by Emma Sacco. How books are made is supported by Electric Book Works, where we develop and design books for organizations around the world. You can find us online atelectricbookworks.com.