Glastonbury
Press And Bindery
Some years ago I sought quotes on runs of mass-market paperbacks from one of the UK’s largest printers. I was told that I would get better prices if I agreed to go to print during their ‘slack’ periods. The presses are expensive to shut down and restart, so they run them 24 hours a day, 364 days a year. It became clear that it is not a thirst for knowledge that drives the market, but the insatiable hunger of the printing machines to devour paper and ink.
In the more than thirty years I have been selling books I have observed an inexorable decline in quality. Publishing has become too easy. I could ask ChatGPT to produce a text, get the typesetting and imposition done on Adobe Creative, design the cover in Photoshop, send the files off to Lightning Source, and within 24 hours a book would be on its way to me. But would it be any good? And would anyone read it?
When Covid brought the carousel to a blissful halt I had time to reconsider. I sold my wholesale business and invested the proceeds in letterpress. The indefatigable Graham Moss told me the easy way to make a small fortune from letterpress printing; start with a large one. We still don’t know how to make this work financially, but we are striving to make books so beautiful that people will be prepared to pay enough to justify the labour involved, the hours setting type letter by letter, locking the text into a forme that prints evenly, printing page by page on our Wade Arabs and Rochat Albion, commissioning engravers to produce woodblocks, handstitching the gatherings, paring leather, and handtooling covers.
It begins with a text. What is worth saying? What is worth turning into a book that will endure? The conservator and medievalist James Cassels told us on a rebacking course that we should use alum-tawed leather rather than morocco because the former would last 500 years rather than 150. What do we want to leave behind for readers of the future? A Canticle for Leibowitz?