10 x 16" single sheet. Broadside letterpress printed on Domestic Etching paper. Text set in 18pt ATF Garamond with the title in Americana. Printed in two colors. Signed and numbered by the printer. Chad Pastotnik: "I was hoping to do the text in Baskerville to keep it all UK-centric but, alas, when hand setting type one is constrained to the amount of sorts in the case. Even with the Garamond I was short four o's and had to run the last four lines as a separate press run. "The image is a old wood engraving of mine that first appeared in a small edition (50) of poems by Terry Wooten back in 1997 called Hermaion. With a few more cuts to the block I think it makes an admirable companion to If. "If you’re British or an Anglophile you know all about this poem of course. It’s been voted Britain’s favorite poem uncountable times by various survey entities and carries significant meaning beyond the aforementioned immutable British stereotype. I’ll let you do your own googling for info on Dr. Leander Starr Jameson and the Boers War. Kipling wrote this for his own son, who died in WWI only a few years after the poem was published in Rewards and Fairies in 1909, a shock Kipling never fully recovered from."
*Note from Vamp & Tramp: In the third verse fourth line on the broadside 'adout' should be 'about'. This was our take on typos (from our 2012 Abecedary): Typos As much as control seems like a worthy goal and a likely source of contentment, in our world mistakes, the typos of life, abound. Several strategies seem possible: accept nothing but perfection and live with high blood pressure and/or blood alcohol content; accept your limitations: "The heart, to be sure, always has something to say about what is to come, to him who heeds it. But what does the heart know? Only a little of what has already happened" (Alessandro Manzoni); or adopt the following attitude (supplied by Rollin Milroy, Heavenly Monkey Press): "The Allen Press did a polyglot Bible leaf book c. 1966, and the colophon credits a Chinese proverb – 'typos intentionally left in so that people who find them may feel superior.'" The multiple choice test strategy works in this case: when in doubt the third possibility (C) is the best choice. |
