Puck's Song Revisited

A couple of years ago, I put together a set of photo-collages illustrating "Puck's Song", something that will probably be remembered by anyone who has read Rudyard Kipling's version of English history, as told by the Oldest Old Thing in England to a couple of imperialists-in-training young children, in his book Puck of Pook's Hill. At the time I made the twelve core images available as that year's calendar (handily there are twelve stanzas), and also as a little booklet.

I had always intended to revisit this work in order to produce something more substantial, and have now done so. It will become publicly available later in October via Blurb as a magnificent 12" x 12" hardback book. However, even at production cost a copy of this will come in at around £50, so I don't expect to sell many (any?). It's the sort of "vanity project" that is mainly intended to leave something substantial for posterity to marvel at: why on earth wasn't this man taken more seriously in his time? Well, it worked for William Blake.

So, in anticipation of limited sales (and initially for readers of this blog only) in addition to the book I am making available a very nice, very high-resolution PDF version of the entire thing (40 pages), also via Blurb for just £7.49. Both the book and the PDF are available immediately, but for now this is an "invitation only" offer via this link. Note that it's a 21 Mb file download. Alternatively, you can pay me £12.50 via PayPal (my email address is in the "View My Complete Profile" gadget at top right), email me your terrestrial address, and I will mail you a copy of an artisanal CD containing the PDF, anywhere in the world, in its own handcrafted container.

There will be prints, too. The individual images are roughly 40cm in diameter, and will be printed archivally on a 50cm x 50cm sheet of Hahnemühle German Etching paper by the excellent theprintspace, whose services I thoroughly recommend. The samples I have look fantastic. I haven't settled on a price or an edition size for these yet, but if you might be interested, please do get in touch. I think we can safely say each print will cost more than a copy of the hardback Blurb book, however...

NOTE: If you do go for the PDF, for the best viewing experience you need to set your reader (typically Adobe Acrobat, or an alternative like Foxit) so that you are seeing a two-page view, but also with a separate cover page. This ensures the correct pages face each other. Unfortunately, this is not hard-coded into the PDF's properties by Blurb, which is annoying.

In Acrobat the settings are:
  Under the menu "View" / "Page Display" choose all of:
    "Two Page View"
    "Show Gaps Between Pages"
    "Show Cover Page in Two Page View"

In Foxit the settings are similar:
  In the menu "View" there is a "Page Display" pane:
    Click the "Facing" icon and the "Separate Cover Page" icon