This section on Forthcoming books is always written with a certain determined wistfulness. Making books as we do, almost entirely by hand, and often with substantial texts, is an occupation haunted by chance. While the books are certainly under way, and will be finished, we have learned that projected dates are endlessly flexible – not because we wish them to be, but because those metaphysical bureaucrats, the Fates, become increasingly jocular as we get older. So we ask your patience, and invite your trust. The books will emerge. This, together with death and taxes, is sure.

Some planned books have had to be rescheduled because of delays with Pericles, some for other reasons. Gaylord Schanilec – Pictures & Stories, a major overview of the renowned American engraver’s colour engravings, is still projected, but the Pericles factor and the complicated logistics of getting the blocks to us have pushed it even further back. The blocks will be interspersed with Gaylord’s own narratives about their inspiration and the processes of their creation. Allowing for unavoidable delays in our schedule and in Gaylord’s, we have re-scheduled this book to 2013-14. (Remember that subscribers to Endgrain Editions will receive their 20% series discount on this volume.)

In the meantime we have had a stroke of serendipity. The Massey College library at the University of Toronto has among its holdings eight wood engraved blocks produced by the Dalziel brothers, who were well-known trade engravers in the latter half of the 19th century. Among many other things, the Dalziels engraved John Tenniel’s iconic illustrations for Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass. These eight blocks, dating from the 1860s or ‘70s, are illustrations for some of the Ingoldsby Legends by Richard Barham, but as far as is known the images were never published. As it happens, selections from The Ingoldsby Legends were among the favourite poems read to Crispin by his father when he was a child, so it will be pleasing to produce a selection of the poems with these contemporary illustrations to accompany them. This is planned for the early summer of 2012.

In addition to this, editorial work has started on an important book about the Curwen Press. In 2009 we acquired the entire Curwen collection of Monotype ornaments, together with well over a hundred standing borders used in their work for many clients, press proofs of the borders in use, and over a hundred packets of new ornaments still in the foundry wrappings. Bordering on the Sublime: Ornamental Typography at the Curwen Press will reprint these borders, most in two or more colours, accompanied by essays by David Jury and Crispin Elsted on the Curwen Press’s history, Their place in British and European printing and design between the wars, their work with ornaments, and the use of ornaments generally. We plan to have this book in the press this summer, and to publish it early in 2013.

A further important book to appear in 2013 will be another in the Endgrain Editions series, An Engraver’s Progress: a Fifty Year Retrospective of the Work of Simon Brett, which will be launched at the Oxford Fair in November 2013 in celebration of Simon’s 70th birthday.