Light fills the house like a huge stranger
leaning in at the windows
and watching.
from Sun, by Jos Smith
The year is warming and guillemots are moving back into their cities along the cliffs. So while we’re being sociable, maybe we could have a little catch up.
Our first pamphlet of the year was Jos Smith’s Sun. We used our favourite Mohawk Superfine papers and found some lovely solargraph and pinhole camera images by Dave Wise for the cover and to frame the insides of the book. The cover title is subtly embossed, which has really lifted it. We’re very pleased. Have a look and see what you think.
To update you on the year’s publications, we’re already looking pretty full and busy, which is great, with work from both new and established writers and artists. Any day now, Kate Walters’ Iona Notebooks will be ready. This will be a limited edition art book, printed on Accent stock from GF Smith, and each will be hand numbered and signed by the artist. The book will be £12 and every order will come with six Kate Walters postcards, specially made by Guillemot Press for this edition. Instead of our normal dimensions, this book will be squared, giving the paintings, drawings and writing a little more space.
In terms of new poetry, I’m really excited to see what the crown of sonnets by Martyn Crucefix is going to look like. It is currently being illustrated with a book design by the tremendously talented Phyllida Bluemel. We hope to publish this early summer, soon after our triptychs are ready.
The letterpress triptych series is hugely exciting. Twelve poets, three poems each. Each triptych is printed separately in a limited edition of just 50 (plus 12, one each for the poets). They will be sold in box sets (price tbc). The work is all ready to go and we’re just trying to book time with the 1928 Thompson letterpress. The list of poets is astonishing. This year’s twelve are: Peter Riley, Mona Arshi, Toby Martinez de las Rivas, Rebecca Goss, Rowan Williams, Nathan Thompson, Sarah Cave, Isabel Galleymore, Thomas A Clark, John Deane, Robert Lax and Rupert Loydell. If you’re interested in this very limited edition letterpress series, please email us.
Later in the year, we will have a debut collection from Nicola Stringer, a new pamphlet by Rosmarie Waldrop, and a new collection from Andrew McNeillie. There are a handful of further titles we’re waiting to finalise, including an interesting avant garde German translation, some American fragmented minimalism, a visual poem sequence, and a little photography, perhaps.
In other news, our collection of machines we hardly know how to use is growing handsomely. The latest addition is a risograph. Photos to follow – once we’ve found a way of squeezing it into the nest. We would like to add hand and letterpress printers, and I spent a surprising number of hours contemplating guillotine trimmers the other night.
We continue to receive (and encourage) terrific poetry submissions, but I’d like to invite something weirder for a small imprint we hope to launch. So what do you have in the way of visual or narrative material on alternative cartography, lost worlds, or the monstrous? We love the edgelands, both literal and metaphorical, and these exaggerations of the places beyond those we know continue to intrigue us. If you have ideas, work or research you think might interest us, please get in touch.
Happy Spring to you all.