Cover Story

What with the weather and Covid precautions, I simply haven't been getting out as much as I usually would at this time of year. As a consequence, tinkering has been the order of the day (whatever that means), and photography (as in taking new photographs) has taken a back seat. Writing blog posts has also, um, withered on the vine a bit. Ah, metaphors! Mix and blend to taste.

One result has been that I keep creating more "decorated" page-spreads from Let's Get Lost – it's fun to do, and a pleasant way to spend a rainy afternoon and evening, while your partner runs a 24/7 Higher Ed call-centre in the room upstairs. I now have far more than the twelve I need for a calendar but, as I have no intention of doing all sixty pairs from the original book (and that was an edited-down selection of candidate pairings), I decided that, rather than waste them, I'd set up a Blurb "magazine" with these fantasy page-spreads actually spread across a double page. This requires a little tweaking of the original size and distribution of the page elements, but the end result looks quite promising.

Actually, the most fun I have had with this was designing the new cover you see above. Blurb magazines have no spine text, so what you see there will simply be wrapped around the 50-odd perfect-bound pages, 28cm x 22cm. There was a golden age of commercial book-binding straddling the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th centuries, when gold-blocked and blind-embossed cloth bindings were de rigueur for pretty much any publication, with the more prestigious ones getting the full-on design treatment, ranging from the discreetly tasteful to the, um, exuberant. Here are a couple of examples from our own bookshelves: 

That Tennyson is the famous "Moxon Tennyson" of 1857, an edition heavily illustrated with Pre-Raphaelite engravings by the likes of Rossetti, Millais, and Holman Hunt. It's not in great condition – "foxed and water-stained", in the jargon – but then I did buy it for 7s 6d ("seven and six", or 37.5p in today's money) from a junk shop in Middle Row in Stevenage's "Old Town" when I was a teenager in the late 1960s, and it probably marks the start of my book-collecting mania. Actually, no, that would have been the three random volumes of Allen's Naturalist's Library – published in 1894, and illustrated with colour lithograph plates – that I bought from another Stevenage Old Town junk shop for 2s 6d each ("half a crown", or 12.5p) when I was eleven. In that same junk shop – next to George Brown's motorbike shop [1] – I remember coming across a box of old glass-plate photographs from some Polar expedition that I regret not buying to this day. They can't possibly have been by Frank Hurley, though! Can they?

I don't think I knew it then, but as it happens several generations of my paternal ancestors had worked as bookbinders, ranging from "pocket-book makers" in Edinburgh to my grandfather at publisher J.M. Dent's Temple Press in Letchworth where, amongst many other things, the "Everyman" books were produced. So I suppose you could say books and book-design are in my blood. Which is probably why our house is quite so full of useless but beautiful books. Sadly, my new cover will only be the picture of a luxurious cloth binding, printed onto glossy card: I dread to think what it would cost to produce something like that these days.

1. George Brown, in his day, was the most famous racer from Stevenage. Obviously, Lewis Hamilton holds that distinction now, and he's a real Stevenage boy, who grew up in the same street as me, despite what he says about the place now. Brown had a strong association with Vincent Motorcycles, which were made in a small factory pretty much within the grounds of my Stevenage grammar school, Alleyne's. If you don't know your motorbikes, you may know Richard Thompson's song, "1952 Black Lightning". That's probably quite enough links for one little note...