My big publication this year will be a special one, a serious foray into Letterpress limited editions - The Hyphen is a Dagger : Guillaume IX, Crusader Troubadour.
It will be launched at the remarkable St Bride’s Foundation on November 22nd, with tickets now available below.
https://sbf.org.uk/whats-on/view/the-hyphen-is-a-dagger-poets-and-printers-in-collaboration/
The Hyphen is a Dagger; Guillaume IX, troubadour crusader by Angie Butler, Pat Randle, SJ Fowler. Published by Nomad Letterpress and AB Press.
The gallant errant crusading knight, and the world’s first troubadour, Guillaume IX of Poitiers visits his former comrade-in-arms Sir Richard de Croupes. In the ancient Cotswold village of Whittington, future home of the eponymous press, will Guillaume, fine dining, be able to resist the temptations of a beaked devil?
A limited edition of 100, letterpress printed, original poetry sequence.
A distinctive, eccentric and playful work of literature, The Hyphen is a Dagger is a product of a unique ground-up collaborative project between printers and poets - Angie Butler, Pat Randle and SJ Fowler. Working in cahoots from scratch, this publication was made with its specific letterpress production as a constraint and guide. Using only wood-letter typefaces from the stores of the legendary Whittington press in the heart of the Cotswolds, and working to vocabularies available from the letters on hand, the poems were written by Fowler to be then edited, while being set, across a series of collaborative in press sessions over 2022 and 2023. The poems themselves relate to the the place of their making, centering around the real life crusader Sir Richard de Croupes, whose tomb adjoins the press in Whittington court. Guillaume, the hero of the story, was the first recorded troubadour. For print afficionados, the text is buffeted with labels of each typeface used, from the Delittle collection of 1888. This publication is a rare example of what is possible when contemporary writers and printers work together with simultaneous purpose.