The Hollow Humor exhibition at Natalie Galustian Rare Books in Cecil Court closes on the 31st January. If you’ve not been, there are paintings including Winterfold (above) and prints from the book Holloway and Humor. Most of the work is on display downstairs, whilst upstairs is the bookshop; taken over these past few months by the Faber Social pop-up shop, selling the complete list of Faber’s music and film-connected list. And, of course, my very own Humor, in both regular hardback and doubleplusgood hemp special limited edition…

Natalie Galustian Rare Books, 22 Cecil Court, London, WC2N 4HE. It might be an idea to phone ahead if you’re going out of your way: 020 7240 6822

My apologies for the lack of ‘updates’ on this recently. There was a holiday or something. It’s all a bit hazy. Anyway, I’ve been over at Richard Lawrence’s workshop, printing what will form the cover of the next journal from Paul Kingsnorth’s Dark Mountain project. Paul read from his novel The Wake at the Faber Social I curated back in November, and the Dark Mountain project is, weirdly perhaps, how I came to hear of him in the first place. It’s very interesting but I don’t think that I, hampered as I am by a flippant and casual attitude, can explain it very well, so you’re best of clicking the link just above. Anyway, I did a linocut for the cover over the hazy holiday, and this is what it looks like.

I’m intending to make a screen print from it, by the way, as a companion piece to the one I’m making of the linoleum smeuse I cut for the cover of Robert Macfarlane’s new book Landmarks, which is, incidentally, published on March 6th 2015. I’m sure I’ve explained what a ‘smeuse’ is elsewhere, but if I haven’t, it’s a hole made in the bottom of a hedge by the repeated passage of a small animal. Nice, hey? Anyway, here’s the smeuse:

I’ve already finished the artwork for the screen print of this, and I’ll be printing that very soon. And it will be on the new Slowly Downward Manufactory webshop, along with some other new things, if I get it together. Never mind; here it is on the drying rack…

This is an edition of ten, which will be available exclusively from Penguin at some time, probably around the publication of Landmarks. I will endeavour to keep you posted about that; if not here then on the twitter or the instagram. And hapy n yr and all that.

Fucking elves. I thought elves were supposed to do all the work at this time of year, but no luck. I don’t know if there’s an agency or something, but if there is no-one told me about it. So in the absence of elves, myself and the long-suffering Comrade Winstanley have been in the Manufactory for days, in temperatures that beggar belief, printing, smoking and refurbishing the Zmas Boutique in a fetching shade of forced optimism. Yes, we tell each other, everything is going to be just great.

Anyway, the point of me sitting here, typing into this infernal machine, is to tell you, o beauteous public, that the Boutique now offers some new work, including a Golden Solstice Smeuse, an Insane Minotaur, a Treasure Island Sunset, and an antique piece which is, for reasons lost somewhere in the last years of the Twentieth Century, called Else.

Bon voyage, and don’t forget to turn out the lights on your way out. Salut, and happy zmas.

So, right, each year I do this thing of making a small edition of prints using 23.5ct gold powder from L.Cornelisson & Son in London. It’s a bit scary, pouring one of the more expensive powders available into varnish, but the results are really nice; and a lot more appealing than the photo below, which I must confess I took with an iPad. But still, you get the idea.

This print is, as usual, in an edition of 24 (as I can’t do an edition of 23.5) and entails 11 layers, 6 of which are gold and 5 are black. The effect intended is one of a golden mist. This one is called ‘Golden Solstice Smeuse‘. The first couple of years I did a golden holloway, then last year it was a golden avenue; this year, a smeuse. You probably don’t know what a smeuse is; I didn’t, until this summer when I was sent the manuscript for Robert Macfarlane’s forthcoming book ‘Landmarks‘. In it, he has prepared a number of glossaries of words which you would struggle to find in a standard dictionary. They are words from dialect, slang and so on, and describe matters loosely pertaining to the land. For instance, an old Essex dialect term for a kestrel is ‘wind-fucker’. An old Sussex word for the gap at the bottom of a hedge made by the regular passage of a small animal is… smeuse.

I’ve done a linocut of another smeuse for the cover of the book – I don’t know when it’s coming out, but it’ll be soonish, I think. Recommended reading, innit. Anyway, me and Comrade Winstanley only just finished printing at about 6pm this evening, but the print is now ready for its launch into the world, which is taking place over at the Zmas Boutique. Along with a few other new things, as we have updated the old place; given it a refurb. Or a defurb. Or a makeunder. Anyway, there’s some new stuff there.

Here’s a test print – a ‘make-ready’ – of Obelisks, which will accompany the limited hemp paper edition of Humor. As you might be able to see, it’s not quite right yet and the watermarked minotaur is, um, upside down. The whole project has been a lot more complex than anybody imagined… It turned out that getting the cannabis bale out of Spain was the easy bit. Things got tricky later, as the ‘dandy’ (the thing that makes the watermark in the paper making process) was made somewhere in the far north of Scotland, the paper was made in Hertfordshire, which is basically next to London, and neither of these processes were easy, as this is the first time that paper has been made out of cannabis in the UK for ages.

However, it’s now done, and shortly I’m off to somewhere (not sure where yet) to sign the edition of 250 prints AND 250 books. That too will take a little while.

Here’s the details of the edition:

It’s occurred to me that some may not know that cannabis, hemp, marijuana, grass, weed etc are the same plant, and that the plant has a long and extremely fruitful relationship with people. If you were wondering why all this is important, here’s a paragraph from Jack Herer’s book about hemp, ‘ The Emperor Wears No Clothes’…

“Until 1883, from 75-90 percent of all paper in the world was made with cannabis hemp fiber, including that for books, Bibles, maps, paper money, stocks and bonds, newspapers, etc. The Gutenberg Bible (in the 15th century); Pantagruel and the Herb pantagruelion, Rabelais (16th century); King James Bible (17th century); Thomas Paine’s pamphlets, The Rights of Man, Common Sense, The Age of Reason (18th century); the works of Fitz Hugh Ludlow, Mark Twain, Victor Hugo, Alexander Dumas; Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland (19th century); and just about everything else was printed on hemp paper.”

And that’s only paper – hemp was used widely. Its prohibition may have been one of the more blunderingly stupid actions of history, but if you doubt this and would be inclined to find out more, I thoroughly recommend Jack Herer’s book. His website is here.

An exhibition of some drawings, prints and painting that closely or loosely connect with Humor will open on Friday at Natalie Galustian Rare Books, 22 Cecil Court, London, WC2N 4HE. All work for sale to fund my out-of-control absinthe habit.

Last weekend, in between me working in clouds of graphite and chalk dust, Comrade Winstanley came over to the studio and we printed another Treasure Island edition; this one with a red and orange sea which is going to be called Treasure Island Sunset. It’s still to be guillotined, checked, numbered, signed and stamped, but it should be up on the Zmas Boutique in a couple of weeks. (I know, these simple tasks shouldn’t take so long…) It is identical in every respect to Treasure Island Blues, except for the colour of the ocean – a wine-dark sea – but the earlier release sold out so quickly that I thought it’d be a good idea to do another one. Also I think there are some more prints to be added to the FOUND department, but I haven’t quite figured that out yet. I’m currently far away.

Printing can get a bit complicated. I know that for most people it’s just a matter of clicking ‘print’ on a dialog box on a computer, but it’s not like that for me and Richard Lawrence. Richard has been printing my ‘Holloway’ prints; the ones that have just gone on sale in the Zmas Boutique. These are done on a 1965 Heidelberg platen press; the exact same machine that we used to print the 277 copies of the first edition of Holloway.
We had a few problems with ink getting into places where it shouldn’t be, and so Richard is, as I write, fixing the problem…
“I am getting there. I am also learning more things about my Heidelberg. A frisket made of beermat supplemented by strips of draft excluder all held together with copious amounts of masking tape has nearly done it. What I have learned is that the ink smearing is due to the sheet being drawn to the block by the vacuum as the press opens. This explains the one little bit of the press that I never really understood before. There are holes in the roller tracks that blow air into the void between the printing surface and the paper as the machine opens. For whatever reason I never previously seen fit to connect these up. Now I just need to find a short piece of flexible piping.
I found a piece of pipe at about 5.25pm. It’s silicone and from my local tropical fish supplier. Helps a bit, but slowing the press just as it opens (careful use of clutch) does the most to help.”

Here’s a bad photo of the press that I took when we were printing Wage Packet covers the other week. Not exactly an Epson XP666, is it?

You know this, because you’re looking at it. But practically everything that predates this version of my lurking presence on the internet can be found in the archive, although a few things might not work. Actually, a few things definitely won’t work, because they’ve been broken for ages.

I had an unpleasant moment wondering if it might look a bit fucking corporate or something, but I suppose I’ll get used to it. If anyone misses the old random messy stuff the old site is still there in the archive. And I’ll get round to putting loads of pictures in the ‘selected works’ bit some time soonish. Early days, innit.