Well that was some week.  I spent all available time flat out on a new book for the bookfair, from sunday to friday.  I sort of got there, but I swear whenever the next fair is, I'll be ready well before.  As it was, I ended up swearing as pages I thought were dry generously shared their ink with previously clean space, swearing as fingers stuck to fingers and paper and the table and everything they shouldn't, swearing as prints insisted on getting further and further out of registration.  In the end I managed two proof copies for the fair, dry by the time I packed them on saturday morning.

The fair was great - Harald and Helen, the organisers, did a marvellous job, with an informative and up to date website, workshops galore, a newspaper-style programme detailing everything, a large band of helpful volunteers and an always-cheerful presence.  Of course, we would have liked more visitors, but those that came had loads of enthusiasm, which is always nice.  It was Gemma's and my first fair in Scotland, so we met plenty of new book artists from points north and south of us, as well as a good few of the old ones.  As usual, there was an enormous range of imaginative and inventive work, and as usual I spent more than I made - well, it's all so tempting!  One fair, maybe I'll just sit there, sell my stuff and not buy other people's.  Ha!  As it is, I've yet to settle down and really enjoy my latest little collection, which is something to look forward to.

For now, I'm determined that I shall spend the next umpteen weeks finishing off more copies of that latest book and preparing some others at a very sedate speed, so that panic doesn't have to enter into the equation next time I need stock for a fair.

         

Looking down the hall.

Sorry, Gemma, I think I must have been shaking the camera up and down when taking photos of you and your work - this was the least worst blurred of them.

Some of my work - the blue tiger book in the foreground was the one that caused me so much grief last week.

I managed to post off this year's edition for the Littlest Print Exchange.  It went better than last year (not a great feat), which was a great relief, and even got posted slightly earlier than the very last minute.  The theme, broadly, was propoganda, which proved more testing than I expected.  Having been impressed by how inventive everyone was last year, this year mine is two-sided, but I do consider one side to be much better than the other - I think that's down to laziness when it came to the preparatory stage.

What I should be doing now (right now!) is working on something or somethings new for the Glasgow International Artists' Bookfair in a titchy EIGHT DAYS' TIME.  I have a distressing tendency to wait until time is really too short, before settling to a final flurry and not quite achieving what I set out to achieve.  Things have been started, but there's a loooong way to go yet.

And here's my latest pot.  It's not big, it's not clever - in fact, it's rather silly.  But I can't help it, I find it riduculously fun, and feet will be cropping up again... 

Recently had my first visit to the Bodleian in Oxford.  They have an exhibition of tomes of medieval romance at the moment and it's sooooo good.  Well, it's books - from my point of view, they'd have to work really really hard to lose my interest (I won't be surprised to find that every one of their exhibitions is a total delight).  Apart from the stories themselves of high honour and tragedy and adventure and lust and loss, there's the packaging - I like packaging and will always take a book's cover into account.  Age-darkened leather, heavy old paper, close-written lines (shivering monks with eyesight failing, stooped over their work in poor light, surely), ornate decoration, dainty illustrations.  I'm not terribly imaginative.  I'd like to be, I really would, but when I look at time-worn steps and ancient drovers' roads, what I see and like is the stone, the creation - the creators and even the users rarely play their part in my thoughts.  But old books, especially the hand written ones or those with later notations in the margins, they work in an instant.  And they're things of beauty.  In an ideal world I would settle down in there for a week or a month or maybe a year and just soak myself  in them.