Pick A Colour, Any Colour

Fri, 13 Aug 2010 13:14:14 +0100

You can now commission a Longstitch Sketchbook in pretty much any colour you desire.

Select your colour choice(s) from the Harmatan Fine range, giving you greater choice and scope for expressing your individuality compared to buying a sketchbook from stock.

I’ll bind your sketchbook with beautifully co-ordinating linen thread and plant fibre endpapers - although please feel free to suggest your own colour preferences.

Here’s one I made earlier, in ‘Green 17’
What’s so great about the Harmatan Fine range - apart from its quality - is that the skins retain their natural properties, as Harmatan & Oakridge explain:

“Only sumac and other natural materials are used in the tannage... these skins are hand polished and finished to show the beauty of the natural grain”.

This is Harmatan ‘Scarlett 20’, ready to bind with yellow thread and red and gold endpapers:

Many leathers are ‘corrected’ - cosmetically repaired - and then machine-embossed with a metal plate to either correct grain variation or to give interesting finishes, such as ‘elephant’, ‘wood’ or ‘alligator’.

These machine-embossed leathers certainly have their place and I sometimes use them for making books with distinctively textured covers.

But these Harmatan goatskins are beautifully natural; Harmatan & Oakridge explain that: “the natural character of each skin is maintained, no pigment finishes are added and no grain correction is made”.

As such they may show slight natural markings which prove their natural state and which enhance their individual beauty.

You can view the full range of colours on the Harmatan and Oakridge website where you can also see a close-up of the Goatskin’s grain.

You could have chocolate brown to match your trustworthy carry-everything, go-everywhere bag, purple to co-ordinate with your outrageous hair, or yellow to express your enthusiasm for all things creative.

Prices from £50 for an A5 size Sketchbook, other sizes on request. Lead times are currently around 3 weeks depending on the time it takes to receive the skin from the supplier.

Please don’t hesitate to contact me with any questions, you can click on the email button below.

New Refill Service

Mon, 26 Jul 2010 15:20:36 +0100

Whilst it’s always exciting to connect with new people, it’s most heartwarming to renew past connections.

After a past customer contacted me requesting new pages for her much beloved and now completely full sketchbook, I realised that the continuity of one material, one format, one binding can assist with the smooth flow of writing or drawing.

So I’m now offering a refill service for my - I mean, your - sketchbooks.

You can either disbind the sketchbook yourself and file away the pages, or you can send the entire sketchbook to me.

I will - whilst respecting your privacy - carefully disbind the sketchbook and sew its sections together to make a bookblock which you can store, safe in the knowledge that its pages will never fall out of order or get lost.

It’ll be posted back to you along with your newly refilled sketchbook, which could have the same, or different, paper and thread as the original.

Here are some pictures to illustrate the process:

A year old sketchbook:

The longstitch is cut:

The pages are disbound:

And slip-stitched to form a bookblock:

The cover is refilled with new pages:

As good as new:

Ready to send back to you:

For full details, paper options and prices, please email your requirements to: susan@susangreenbooks.co.uk

World Book Day

Thu, 4 Mar 2010 10:59:00 +0000

To celebrate World Book Day I’d like to introduce you to two books which are favourites of mine as much for their design as for their content. Both are connected with rural Dorset, where I’ve lived most of my life.

We Have Heard Ravens: Poems drawn from Dorothy Wordsworth’s Journals, by Catherine Simmonds.

Published by Flagon Press in 2008, this beautiful book is one of an edition of 1,000 copies.

The covers are waterford rough 300gsm paper, illustrated with a painting by Alice Crane. It’s typeset in 10pt Monotype Centaur roman and italic and printed on supreme book wove 100gsm.

It’s very tactile and is something I treasure for its design, although I do enjoy it’s contents, excerpts drawn from Dorothy Wordsworth’s journals during the years 1798 to 1803.

“The sky to the north was of a chastened
yet rich yellow fading into pale blue and streaked
and scattered over with steady islands of purple
melting away into shades of pink.

It made my heart almost feel like a vision to me.”

- Sunday [June] 20th, 1802

After their father’s death in 1783, Dorothy and her brother William were despatched separately to relatives, but were reunited in 1795 and then stayed at Racedown Lodge in Dorset, enjoying long walks over the Dorset and Somerset countryside with their friend Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

Catherine Simmonds was born in and returned to Dorset after studying English Literature at university. She works across arts organisations and is a writer and poetry performer.

We Have Heard Ravens can be ordered directly from James Crowden Publishing, of which Flagon Press is an imprint.

- - - -

Some Poems by William Barnes, by Hilary Barnett

This outwardly unassuming artist’s book is full of treasures. Compiled, illustrated and bound by Hilary Barnett in 1986, it’s quarter bound in a light tan leather and green bookcloth, now worn smooth by 24 years of admiration.

The decoration is simple, the spine debossed with ‘William Barnes’ and a corner of the front cover depicts a church, hand illustrated in gold.

This book is charming for many reasons: it is small, and small things always enchant and illicit care, attention and protection. It is also attractive because it is completely hand bound, the endpapers are clearly marbled by hand and it is all the work of one person.

It is also imperfect - its pagination is muddled, the typesetting sometimes wonky and the tip of one of the binding threads sticks up through the back endpaper - but I find this endearing.

Although fluent in Greek, Latin and Modern European languages, Barnes’ identity and work was rooted in his native Dorset.

These poems describe life in the Dorset countryside and Hilary Barnett has illustrated them with the scenes they depict: woods, hills and streams, a village nestled in a valley, and its woodsheds, church and cottages.

Some of the poems are in Dorset dialect:

“Ithin the woodlands, flow’ry gleaded,
By the woak tree’s mossy moot,
The sheenan grass-bleades, timber-sheaded,
Now do quiver under voot”.

- My Orcha’d In Linden Lea

That long, wide and curving ‘a’ sound, written by Barnes in the 19th century as ‘ea’, is one I grew up hearing in the rural north Dorset of the 20th century and its echo sometimes creeps gently into my voice today.

Haiku Competition Results

Sun, 29 Nov 2009 15:55:53 +0000

Thank you to all who entered the competition! I felt privileged to receive your poetry and it made for an enjoyable and thought-provoking week. I hope you all had fun squeezing your ideas into such a restricted number of syllables.

I also send a very big thank you to those who spread the word on Twitter, your support is very much appreciated.

Smallness

Your interpretations of the topic ‘smallness’ ranged from stars to atoms, with bumble bees and snow popular themes. All in all I was put in mind of a vast world sleeping through winter, waiting for the first tiny indications of the great promise of the seasons: springtime.

After much consideration and re-reading of all the entries, I whittled the shortlist down to four.

Three runners-up:

Squeeze all the space out
Of every human’s atoms...
... fills a sugar cube

- Simon Tierney-Wigg

Frozen lonely lives
Small in frost of solitude
With love’s warmth may grow

- Steve Moyes

Watching the snow fall
Tiny worlds upon the ground
Melt with sun’s return

- Julie Okami

The Winner

Chosen because it is so evocative I can easily bring to mind the scene it describes (and I also love the sibilance):

Leaf shoals shivering
In the mist-nest of the trees
Silvered slivers fall

- Andrew Boobier

Many congratulations to Andrew, who wins his choice of one of my Miniature Leather Journals or Vegan Miniature Journals as his prize.

Ideas for the next competition, anyone?

Competition: win a Miniature Leather Journal

Sun, 22 Nov 2009 16:03:17 +0000

My most frequent preoccupations and inspirations are the textures and colours of the natural world, and the feelings evoked by being outside during the various seasons.

So this competition combines that subject with the small nature of my popular Miniature Leather Journals, one of which (not necessarily the one pictured) I'd love to give away as an early Christmas present.

To enter, just write a haiku. Your haiku must be on the subject of smallness and, in haiku tradition, evoke the natural world.

Haikus have 3 lines, alternating between 5, 7 and 5 syllables.

Here's some inspiration:

Wiki entry on Haiku
Wiki entry on Kigo (season words)
British Haiku society

Please don't think you have to be 'A Writer' to enter. Anyone can - it's just a bit of fun and if you've never written a word, here’s a chance to stretch yourself and try something a little different, little being the operative word.

The author of my favourite haiku will win a Miniature Leather Journal (or a vegan synthetic PU journal if preferred). They’ll also have their haiku published here, along with a link to their website, blog, organisation, or business (at my discretion - nothing offensive, illegal, etc).

Email your entry by the evening (GMT) of 28th November to: susan@susangreenbooks.co.uk

The winner will be announced on Twitter and notified by email on the 29th November.

Happy writing and good luck!

Susan