Arete Editions

Proof of an illustration by Dave McKean for the forthcoming edition of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button by F Scott Fitzgerald to be published by Arete Editions.

A couple of weeks ago (shee, time goes so fast) I posted photos of the leather numbered edition of Frozen Hell that I said we were going to do some changes with. Here is the revised version. Rich tried a flat spine, (the other had a rounded spine, so we could see how the ornate stitching/construction of the interior would work with the two different bindings) which works pretty well, and the changed designs. It was only one snowflake that went, but so much clearer! We also changed the spine blocking. Getting there!

Frozen Hell. The book is made with metal monotype, each word is cast by the foundry and set by Phil and Robert at Hand and Eye Press, it is a lengthy process, I’ll show you some more clips of the words being set soon. Once we have checked the soft proofs and Phil has set the type, it is then checked with a proof. Here you can see some of the work behind scenes of a couple of the pages being pulled so we can check everything is good before we go ahead!

Art! Here’s a progression of Greg’s work on one of the plates inside the Frozen Hell book, McReady is trying an experiment to see if they can deduce through a test to see whether one who walks amongst the small scientific community is, in fact an alien, The Thing. I love the way that as I work on the book, first choosing the initial sketch and placing the image within the story and then getting each development of the painting, something which is a real surprise and pleasure. I thought you’d like to see these images which ordinarily would never bee seen. They are so cool.

Got the leather numbered dummy version of Frozen Hell from Rich! We are going to change the design and the leather that he used to show us the initial designs. It’s a hefty, big, heavy book! But I thought you’d like to see the different stages.

Rich and Greg Manchess worked together to create the, we hope will be, extraordinary covers for the Frozen Hell books. We wanted them to be a crafted way into the story, a visual, tactile introduction. Here are some of Rich’s tests, done half sized to see whether the designs would work for him. Rich is now creating the prototypes of the books, having worked out the book blocks to see how the spines and bindings would work.

Book blocks. Hope this makes sense, it’s a hard thing to describe. Book blocks are the dummy books that we make using the paper chosen for the text and plates in order to have the bindings made and check every page is correct. Usually it is pretty straight forward, either the plates are to be tipped in as cut plates upon the page, as we did for something like Dorian Gray or tipped in as full bleed images tipped into the gutter. With frozen Hell we’re trying something a bit different. I wanted Greg’s foldout plates, some are four-page plates, to not have a gutter. There are a number of ways to minimise the folding into the gutter, if the plate was in the middle of a section, it would have stitching down the centre but would fold out nicely, however the image often was in the wrong place, you have to adhere to the folding of the section, not what is best for the story. Or you could tip in the plate from the edge and one folds out the image but it is glued to the gutter. We wanted to have the folding out on one side or both to be part of the experience of revealing the picture.

There is an old way of doing these foldout plates. It is still used by maps in books that are bound. It involves stitching a tab into the sections. And then gluing the plates to the tab enabling a relatively gutter free experience of the image. This meant that sections, which have to have 8, 12, 16 pages, have to include in that number the tabs. Because the paper for the letterpress printing would be different from the paper Greg selected for the plates, it would prove to be an incredibly complex dummy, and book, for Ludlow and Rich Tong to create.

It also meant that the single plates would also have to be sewn in too because if we tipped them in it would not help the book open properly.

Their first attempt was a bit of a disaster, three months waiting for it and we’d have to start from scratch again.

In order for everyone to understand how the sections printed with the text would work with the multiple plates I created a mock dummy which showed the way in which they would be stitched together. Starting from an 8-page text section, which allowed us to put a 16-page section together with another 8 pages of tabs and single page tabbed in plates!

All this means is that a another very complex arete/lyra production and should end up being a good reading experience. By the time you have the book in hand I hope none of this work will be seen.

All this is working also with two, possibly three different sized books, if we do a Fine edition, which we are still considering, essentially three completely different books!

Phil Abel at Hand & Eye printing Coraline, it was a complex job printing the book across two print process by a skilful letterpress black and red dead register on the Heidelberg cylinder press by Phil and Robert.

Illustration by Gary Gianni, created for Neil Gaiman’s ‘The Case of Death and Honey’ an Arete Editions project.

The Thing is coming! Frozen Hell…

Cool trailer for the film and soon … will be our book!

I was a kid when I first saw the b&w film ‘Thing from Another Planet’, it led me to find and read ‘Who Goes There’ by John W. Campbell but it was Carpenter’s ‘The Thing’ that blew my mind! A great film from a fantastic story. When the Campbell estate found the original story, pre the edits done by the pulps to fit into the magazine, and found it to be a more adventurous take on his story, I knew we had to make a book of the story. Greg Manchess thought the same, the set up of the horror story felt more grounded and real.