We’ve still not found a suitable place to put all my printing and bookbinding gear in. Commissions started coming in. There’ll be fairs to go to from early September onwards; good reasons for a working visit in my studio. On July 8th I was headed south.
I was back at my old place after a six hours drive over summerly motorways and after having been away for almost three months. I realised, once more, what I loved this place for. It is quiet here. Friday morning was crisp and cold. I went for an early morning walk through the forest on a path well known. It was where we used to walk our dog. The old lady preferred the woods for her daily walks. She has long left us and the forest has grown dense over the years.
Just opposite the room where I was staying is a pond which is meant to be a reservoir of water in the case of a fire in the small hamlet. This pond is overgrown with reed and seemed to be filled with crickets. Their chirr filled the late hours before midnight. But in the end they might have been chirping in that field of rapeseed which, further back, was waiting for being harvested.
It was a great relief that I could not find any signs of uninvited visitors. Over the past two years mice had invited themselves in on a few occasions. They must have wandered in through the open door and decided to make themselves at home. It was house mice in 2013 and shrews in 2014. The house mice came in a group of three and turned out to be tricky to catch. The shrews came one after the other and were surprisingly cooperative. I caught them all alive and gave them a lift to some nicer place outside – far enough away from my deckled edge papers and handmade books.
However, it came as a surprise when I actually watched a sparrow flying into the studio through the open window. The little lad seemd to like the place (well, I don’t blame it) and it took me half of Friday and half of Saturday to persuade it, to go and play with its mates outdoors again.
Working this time meant making books to order. Cutting, folding and sewing sheets. Making covers from fabric and have nice books in the end. My customers wished for books to write into, so it was all blank sheets.
Working also meant packing up artist’s books and prints to have them at hand once it comes to travel to the fairs coming up in autumn. Three dates are fixed. It shall be ferry time twice this year, going from Hoek van Holland to Harwich port again. To start with I’ll be part of Whittington Day at Whittington Press near Cheltenham (UK) on September 5th. We’ll be staying on a couple of days enjoying autumn in the Cotswolds. Last year lucky us two picked what later was said to be the warmest September on record. That was not what we came for, but we enjoyed it all the same.
A couple of weeks later I shall be part of the Fine Press Book Fair at Oxford’s Brookes University. The fair will be open on 31 October and 1 November. We’ll be staying on a few days again, greeting Oxford with its Bodleian Library, its gargoyles, its bookshops, the Covered Market and its coffee houses.
The next fair to come is 5th Book Arts in Weimar on 28 and 29 November. So after having had a rather long period of more than six months with no fairs at all there’ll be a few of them in quite short a period of time.
By Sunday morning all new books were finished and all the boxes with artist’s books and prints were safely piled up and secured in my little van. I hit the road on Sunday 12th July around 9am. It was still warm in the south. The farther north I came the cooler it got and after some 350 kilometres the downpours began. I made it back in good time.
As I write this it is still overcast, we did have more downpours and all the herbs and flowers on our tiny balcony are still going strong. Our basil is very tasty with fresh tomatoes of the season.