I see that it’s four months since I posted! Not a complete shock. Since April we have travelled to Germany to get a special kind of caravan (one that can also transport a printing press) and tested it in the field at an English Civil War Society event at Dagenham in east London. I went on a day course to learn about bookbinding. I poleaxed myself by twisting my knee at another event and have been spending lavish amounts of time trying to get my joints back in working order. I haven’t been completely idle print-wise; I’ve worked up designs for a calendar, though it looks like that will be an offering for 2017, not 2016, and set myself a project target for next year to print and bind an emblem book .

However I can’t deny that when I went in the workshop today, it was sad and cobwebby. The first job was to throw up the blinds, open the windows and get the hoover to clean it out, Then I re-covered the frisket and tidied up the boxes hat contain the travelling equipment. Why? Because this hiatus is coming to an end. Next week I’ll be taking the press to a super weekend  in lovely Herefordshire, and there are two more events in quick succession.

Next weekend sees us at a Civil War re-enactment at a place that saw a siege in those years. Royalist soldiers besieged the castle of Sir Robert Harley, a Parliamentarian. Sir Robert was away and so the defence was conducted by his wife, Brilliana, and her retainers. The Castle remains are still there, but the re-enactment will be staged in the fields nearby and is hosted by Aardvark Books, an independent retailer of new and secondhand books. For anyone journeying through the Marches, a relatively undiscovered but beautiful part of England, Aardvark’s ‘bookbarn’ is an amazing find tucked away in the country lanes. There will be other Living History on show and the battle will consist of an attack by horse, foot and cannon  on a straw castle! It will be nice to show the printing process to booklovers, and hopefully by next year, I should have amassed enough type to actually print a small book.

http://www.aardvark-books.com/Events/Civil%20War%20Re-enactment%202015

The defender of Brampton Bryan