Thame Arts and Literature Festival

Sparksartists were invited to exhibit in the Town Hall where part of Thame's inaugural Arts and Literature Festival is taking place. Here is the banner we printed at p's & q's press for the event.

Experimental etching

I am experimenting with William Blake's method of creating plates for 'illuminated printing'. No-one really knows what this was, but I have tried the technique I was shown at the Tate Gallery on three plates and finally it works. This is a newly etched plate. I love the colours on copper freshly out of the acid.

Sonnet XLIII

I have worked out how best to edition Sonnet XLIII. The idea for it was first formed in response to looking at the Tudor painted ceiling in Thame's new museum and drawing it as part of The Big Draw in October last year.

Shakespeare's words when most I wink then do mine eyes best see describe an aspect of drawing while the intricate painted pattern on the ceiling is like a visual equivalent of the language of the sonnet.

Paper Casts and Chapel Row Exhibition

All day today I have been making the very last paper cast insert for Sleep Walking Through Trees (boxed) using this mould. If you zoom out through the studio door you might find the weeping ash that inspired the mould. In a week or two the whole edition (45 copies of which 15 are boxed) will be complete, having been bound at the Fine Book Bindery. The earliest copies of this letterpress edition started to be collected about four years ago, and printing began not long after my printing press arrived from Brighton. I should celebrate...


I love the way The Chapel Row Gallery in Bath has exhibited our books for their recent exhibition. They were laid out to make looking and handling such an easy pleasure. 'Sleep Walking' is there on the table. Small books were in open cabinets.

Thank you Fine Press Book Association for organising this show! I wish there was a permanent space somewhere so I could finish reading Neil Boulsford's engraved 'Cycle' images, arranged in chapters on the right hand wall. It would be so good if the V&A (who have his book) kept a permanent changing space for books to be seen.

A Storm of Stars

I've been spending more time coming up with book shapes, less in the etching and printing rooms (thanks to book fairs!) It is a real privilege for a visual artist to have such creative interchanges. At the very busy Oxford fair time just flew by. At a much smaller fair in Cirencester the week after, I sold the only completed A/P copy of 'Recovered ; A Storm of Stars Vol. 1' So there's a chance for a rethink before I go into production...


This book (in three small volumes) about 12 women in 1912 and about display, in the shapes of hats and print, needed a new form. The emerging new one (in this photo with its hatbox) is much more about 'display'.
The earlier version (see last year's blog entry) will still exist in it's more secretive form, for research and biography that is still being 'Recovered' and that can be hidden away and rediscovered between pages held together by wooden, printed and sharpened hatpins.

I was delighted that the new book form, which came about totally through expediency because I wanted to put pages into a hatbox, also formed itself into star shapes. One hatbox will hold 'A Storm of Stars' in three volumes. The book's title was taken from a poem by Marina Tsvetaeva.

Here is an invitation to an exhibition in Bath in February during the Bath Literature Festival.

Berlin City Cypher

Leonie Lachlan is shortly going to print the next book in her award winning City Cypher series with p's & q's Press. These images show the lino cuts for City Cypher: Berlin in progress in Leonie's Tea Building Studio in Shoreditch.


The architectural codes for the City Cypher series are taken from Leonie's drawings from tall buildings in cities across the world.

Oxford Book Fair

Below are the details for the next fair in Oxford. The p's & q's press will be there.


Thank you to Carolyn Trant for lending your camera to take this photo of the London Art Book Fair at the Whitechapel.
It was lovely to meet a whole new public at the Whitechapel as well as catching up with some old faces (we were next to Rocket). A Memorable Fancy and Leonie's City Cypher books were very well received. As you can see Leonie was given the Birgit Skiold Memorial Award for the purchase of City Cypher: Paris and City Cypher: Sao Paulo for the V & A.