When you can’t trust who is an alien and who is human, paranoia prevails.

One of the many plates from our new Frozen Hell book coming very soon!

We always wanted a sense of the acute paranoia that prevails as the first realisation that anyone amongst the team could be the alien. Greg perfectly captures the sense of fear and anger that everyone has:

Back from working on Frozen Hell! The books extraordinary production has all been finalised and is being shot in preparation for the launch which is coming very soon. It has, as all craft does, taken much longer than we anticipated. We have always wanted to create art led books, with both Lyra and Arete, and create books which push the usual boundaries in both letterpress (our Coraline has proved that we can make contemporary design work with letterpress techniques that are very old) and book making (Frozen Hell has tabbing and foldouts that have proven very complex, all done to present the art in a stunning fashion .The Roman edition, our version of the classic Lettered Editions, is HUGE! The foldout plates are nearly a metre long or three feet wide, when opened!! Virtually the size of the originals. The Here is an art drop, not of the scale of the foldouts it’s single page plate but….it’s…

THE THING! FROM ANOTHER PLANET!

You can see Greg’s development of the idea and painting, I do love being able to see his creation as he makes the oil painting, something I get to look at and thought I’d share with you.

I got my copy of the portfolio edition of Words of Fire, fantastically dedicated to me by Neil and Bill, wow, I am so pleased with the way it came out, thanks Rich! When Rich was putting the materials together he wanted a cloth bound cover for the book and a suedel-lined slipcase, when they were made he found that the cloth and the suedel rubbed and made the movement of the portfolio out of the case stiff. He added a ribbon which, when you pull it, negated the stiffness and it flows out like water! The lucky ones who got the portfolio and lovely handmade prints of each poem and the unique, 1 of 40, signed silkscreen prints by Bill will be getting them next week, they start shipping out Monday! I can’t post a video at the same time as the photos, Facebook won’t let me, unless I do it from a phone, so I have loaded a vid showing the action of the new ribbon in the comments.

Repost from Praveenna Reads and Quills, Words of Fire Neil Gaiman published by Arete Editions

Hot metal typesetting in Monotype Bembo by Effra Press

Letterpress printed on Bockingford watercolour paper by Hand and Eye

Bound by Rich Tong at Ludlow Bookbinders

So glad I managed to get a copy. Such a beautiful edition. Have read this quite a few times already since receiving it

Printed pages of Coraline by @neilhimself to be bound and published by @lyrasbooks. The illustrations are by @rovinacai and the monochrome ones are printed letterpress with the type. The ones in full colour were digitally printed beforehand by @hurtwoodbooks.

Art! This is one of my favourite paintings from Frozen Hell, it is the frontispiece image of McReady and some of the team seeing the frozen UFO imbedded in ice. It captures the creepy set up that was missing when the editor cut out the first 20% of the story to make ‘Who Goes There?’. I pulled some images from a shot that Greg gave me (which I’ll edit later) of a small movie of him painting. The Thing awaits.

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.