It is always exciting to anticipate books which are in process — at least, it is for us. Working on a book is the special pleasure in what we do. This is not to say that we don’t enjoy a book once it is completed, but if we didn’t love making the books more than looking at them, we wouldn’t produce much!

In this section you will find information about four titles which will be published within the next year. Of these, the major book is certainly The Play of Pericles, an edition of Shakespeare’s romance. Work on the text, newly edited by Crispin Elsted, has occupied more than five years; preliminary discussions with Simon Brett about the illustrations went on over a period of eighteen months, and continue, almost page by page, as he works on the engravings. We anticipate Pericles being our most beautiful book to date. It will include extensive notes and a major essay on the play in a separate volume. This will be an edition of only 115 copies: 100 standard, and 15 deluxe. The Deluxe copies, for bespoke orders only, will have a specially designed binding and a suite of a selection of the engravings for framing. 3 of the deluxe are hors commerce and the remaining 12 will be produced to fill orders already received; in fact, all the deluxe copies are now reserved, but if you are interested we can put your name on a waiting list and notify you if one becomes available. Of the 100 standard copies, well over half are reserved for subscribers and patrons of the press, and a good number more are already pre-ordered by others, so an early reservation is advised. Verbum sat sapienti.

Other publications planned include a major overview of the renowned American engraver Gaylord Schanilec’s colour engravings, which will be interspersed with the artist's own narratives about their inspiration and the processes of their creation. This book, related to but not part of the Endgrain Editions series, will be commenced in the spring and summer of 2008, and we anticipate that the book will be published in the winter of 2008/9. (Please note that subscribers to Endgrain Editions who wish to purchase this book will receive their series discount.)

While Pericles is continuing on his picaresque way, we are planning a late spring 2008 publication of a volume of poems by Tim Bowling, an award-winning Canadian poet and novelist whose work we have admired for some years. His second book of poems, Dying Scarlet (which won the Stephansson Award for Poetry in 1998), remains for us one of the most intelligent and sensitive collections published in this country, and The Paperboy’s Winter is a small masterpiece in the sometimes all-too-familiar genre of the coming-of-age novel.

Tim Bowling has published seven collections of poetry, among them Darkness and Silence (winner of the Canadian Authors Association Award for Poetry), The Witness Ghost, and The Memory Orchard (both nominated for the Governor General’s Literary Award). He is also the author of three novels, Downriver Drift (Harbour), The Paperboy’s Winter (Penguin) and The Bone Sharps (Gaspereau Press). He has won the Petra Kenney International Poetry Prize, the National Poetry Award, and the Orillia International Poetry Prize. Raised in Ladner, not far from the press in the Fraser Valley of British Columbia, he now lives in Edmonton.

The collection we will publish – whose title we have not yet determined – will comprise about a dozen new poems, many of them evoking the Fraser Valley and the west coast of British Columbia. Once we have decided on the title and designed the book, we will post further information. Tim Bowling is a poet well worth meeting, and we hope this book will introduce him to a wider and more international audience.

Other projects are being contemplated in various areas, including subsequent additions to Endgrain Editions and an edition of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night. As things progress and books are completed, we will bring you news of other projects which we hope you will find pleasing, stimulating — and of course irresistible!