The George Gissing Centre, in Thompson’s Yard off the top of Westgate, opened its doors for yesterday’s Wakefield Art Walk. This was Victorian novelist George Gissing’s childhood home. His father, Thomas Gissing was a pharmacist who wrote Ferns and Fern Allies of Wakefield.
There’s currently an exhibition of Wakefield authors at the centre in the form of a timeline, starting with ‘the Wakefield Master’, author of the town’s Medieval Mystery Plays and finishing up with Joanne Harris, Lisa Bradley and I, so I’m in good company.
I’d normally settle down to a session on InDesign on a rainy day but it’s a heatwave keeping us grounded today. In the transfer from my old defunct PC to my iMac, I’m taking advantage of it being easier in InDesign to take images across the gutter.
I’m pleased with how the vectorised place name cartoons have reproduced, slightly simplified into blocks of solid colour, like little woodcuts.
Link
Around Old Ossett at Willow Island Editions, £2.95, post free in the U.K.
It’s got to the stage where, if I’m buying a new book, I let an old one go. It’s difficult because even the ones that I’m not going to read again usually have some kind of story behind them.
This children’s book, first published in 1987 by Heinemann, was inspired by us moving down to Coxley Valley a few years earlier.
At this time of year, the wood and meadow have taken on the early autumnal look that sets the mood for the story, such as it is: it’s a walk through the wood looking at the way birds and animals use sight, smell, hearing, touch and taste.
I included butterflies tasting through their feet and bees seeing ultra-violet but my spread of a pipistrelle bat using echo location turned out looking a bit too technical to sit comfortably with the other spreads.
From my student sketchbook, South Kensington, February 1973: I bought this Bromeliad from a plant shop on Gloucester Road for 80 pence. Bromeliads are epiphytes from Brazil . . . but as to which species this is . . . I don’t know. I water it by filling the central rosette.
Page from my winter 1973 sketchbook.
These crumbly, flakey, croissants are splendid to draw and tasted as good as they looked . . . reminding me of Petit-dejeuner on sunny mornings on the balcony of the Hotel de Centinaire in the Dordogne.
Town Gardening
I’ve dipped into my winter 1973 student sketchbook because this morning I had to decide on one book to throw out – no not the sketchbook! – as I’m trying to send one book to the charity shop for every new book that I buy.
Town Gardening and my sketchbook
Difficult decision as even books that I’m never going to read again have some nostalgic value for me. I bought Town Gardening by Robert Pearson for 15 pence from a bookshop on a quieter back street somewhere near the Kensington end of the Earl’s Court Road and, like the house plants, it was part of my attempt to create my own little green space in the city.
In the student hostel at Evelyn Gardens had a window ledge where I grew sweet corn in cut-down milk tetrapacks. I started – but never finished – constructing my own version of a Wardian case with built-in fluorescent lights.
So the advice in Town Gardening, to use Mowrah meal, derris, DDT or lead arsenate to get rid of that ‘troublesome pest’ the earthworm, when it disfigures your lawn, wasn’t, thank goodness relevant to me.
Yes, probably a wise move parting with this book.
The book had evidently been on the shelf in the bookshop since pre-decimalisation days and it includes this dedication on the front endpaper.
The July Dalesman arrived in this morning’s post and my ‘Wild Yorkshire’ nature diary has a suitably rocky theme, as this year my British Geological Survey paperback, Yorkshire Rock, a journey through time, celebrates 25 years in print.
It’s that time of year again when I realise that I need to improve my plant drawing so I’ve just started Sarah Simblet’sBotany for the Artist and Nature’s Palette, introduced by Patrick Baty. Nature’s Palette was published last month to celebrate the bicentenary of the publication of Scottish artist Patrick Syme’s expanded edition of Werner’s Nomencclature of Colours. Syme suggests a system of 110 standard colours in relation to zoology, botany, mineralogy and anatomy which include ‘Siskin Green’, ‘Flax-flower Blue’ and ‘Gallstone Yellow’.
It’s a book that I need to browse through in a good light, to appreciate the difference between ‘Snow White’ and ‘Skimmed-milk White’, ‘Olive/Clove Brown’ and ‘Liver Brown’.
As I’ve mentioned, my approach to page design is normally to cram as much as I can on a double-page spread but after all the books on typography and graphic design that I’ve read recently and (see previous post) the cereal packets that I’ve studied, I’m trying for a calmer, clearer page layout for my Wakefield Women in History.
I’ve just started reading Helen Gordon’sNotes from Deep Time and the classic page layout struck me as being a pleasure to read, so I’ve been using my layout ruler to measure margins, indents and leading (the space between lines) in the handsome hardback, published by Profile Books.
Dolly Pro
I’d normally go for a familiar, tried-and-tested, roman typeface like Garamond or Baskerville but an article by typographer Dan Rhatigan on Adobe Creative Cloud persuaded me to try a new ‘warm, fairly classic’ alternative for a book typeface, Dolly Pro, designed by Underware. It looks good to me but the test will be when I print a page on paper.
“A sandwich and a cup of coffee, and then off to violin-land, where all is sweetness and delicacy and harmony.”
Arthur Conan Doyle, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
Henry Lloyd-Hughes‘ Sherlock Holmes in Tom Bidwell’sThe Irregulars, appears to have indulged in stronger stimulants than ‘a sandwich and a cup of coffee’ on his journey to ‘violin-land’.
My thanks again to the Netflix team, including costume designer Edward K. Gibbon for the ruffled, threadbare portrait in this week’s Radio Times. The magazine is stuffed with beautifully turned-out, well-scrubbed celebrities, but obviously Holmes after an overdose of his seven-per-cent solution is more appealing to draw with my Lamy Vista and De Atramentis Document Ink.
Leopold Harrison Osterfield), Bea (Thaddea Graham) and Jessie (Darci Shaw)
Sherlock Holmes’ streetwise Baker Street Irregulars were adept at making discrete searches of riverside wharves and back alleys and the new gang in Tom Bidwell’sThe Irregulars, launching tomorrow on Netflix, shouldn’t have any problems blending seamlessly into the crowd, provided they’re making their enquiries during the height of London Fashion Week.
Royce Pierreson’s ever-discrete Watson has dug out his old service revolver – perfect for undercover work – while Billy (Jojo Macari) walks softly and carries an enormous drumstick. Spike (McKell David), a character who appears to be as moody as Heathcliff but who dresses like Harpo Marx, favours a large blunderbuss.
The cast in costumes designed by Edward K. Gibbon appear in this week’s Radio Times, as does Sherlock (Henry Lloyd-Hughes) himself, who doesn’t appear until several episodes into the series.
Lloyd-Hughes looks very much as I picture the original Sherlock. Benedict Cumberbatch as Holmes also features in the article.
As does the actor who appeared in more screen adaptations of Sherlock Holmes stories than anyone else, Jeremy Brett. We were lucky to get to see Brett alongside Edward Hardwicke as Dr Watson in The Secret of Sherlock Holmes at Bradford’s Alhambra Theatre. The Irregulars have a tough act to follow, but it looks as if it will be a lot of fun.
