September 2021

A lot of Gaiman! Some pics from the studio floor, showing the different shelves that hold the metal type, you can see, along with Neil’s Case of Death and Honey, drawers for the Creeping Man too.

The Artist’s edition of Neil Gaiman’s ‘The Case of Death and Honey’ is printed on handmade paper especially made by Gangolf Ulbricht, look! We have got an Arete watermark! I hope you can see the image … simple pleasures.

Another art day. With making these books it is the pleasure of working with artists, like Gary Gianni, that really satisfies me as a creator/designer, just seeing how they make a picture work. This is rarely shown to people who see just a finished book, but I think is really cool!

This is one of the four new illustrations that Gary has done for ‘The Adventure of the Creeping Man’ by Arthur Conan Doyle, the story that inspired Neil Gaiman to write his Holmes story, ‘The Case of Death and Honey’. This image didn’t go through some of the radical changes that some of the others required, we always wanted a ‘classic’ Holmes image with Watson, and what was better than Holmes telling Watson, what was what.

What I like about this series of images is that you can see how Gary decides the composition in a thumbnail then light and dark values in the more formed drawing, then he decides what the room would look like without those values, firming up the image detail, then, which you can see with the final illustration where he combines the two, both the light and dark values and the details. Letterpress printing is like photographic woodblocks done on photopolymer plates, so Phil Abel from Hand and Eye Editions, Arete publisher, had to do loads of tests to make all the details come through, God bless him, it was a long process.

A sheet from the Artist’s Edition of The Case of Death and Honey by Neil Gaiman. Letterpress printed from metal type cast by Effra Press on hand-made paper specially made for this book by Gangolf Ulbricht, printed by Hand and Eye now available for pre-order via our website.

Taking a break from showing the books we have for sale, next week, I hope, to show more of the elaborate printing that goes into Letterpress. Now, it’s an art day. Here is the image for Neil Gaiman’s ‘The Case of Death and Honey’ as Holmes himself says in the story;
‘But when each crime is soluble, and so easily soluble at that, why then there is no point in solving them.
Look: this man has been murdered. Well then, someone murdered him. He was murdered for one or more of a tiny handful of reasons: he inconvenienced someone, or he had something that someone wanted, or he had angered someone.
Where is the challenge in that?’

…

‘I am only alive when I perceive a challenge.’

I love seeing the progression of Gary’s art here, how he started to create the image’s values by having the alley and how that became a wall with the curved light behind, in order to create the right tone for the figures. Wonderful stuff.