I spent a couple days before and after Oak Knoll Fest with my partner James Dissette in Mad Parrot Press (formerly Chester River Press) brainstorming our next projects and making plans. I’ll keep you all updated as things move forward with The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame but we have established size, layout and many other aspects of the book.

We settled on typesetting the book in 14pt Centaur and Arrighi – finally a good excuse to use these exquisite typefaces which we have both admired for years but never quite had the right project for. David Carruthers of Papeterie Saint-Armand in Montreal will be making our custom stock and will most likely be making all of my paper for Deep Wood Press from here forward. Vladimir Zimakov is already onboard illustrating with his glorious linocuts and we will have a couple page spreads to show off in February, 2019 during the CODEX show in Berkeley. This will be a big book, a page size of 11.25 x 14″ (28.5 x 35.5cm) is planned and preliminary layout puts the book at around 116 pages not including front or back matter. Edition size will likely be around 60-70 books.

We’re still toying with the idea of having some sort of introduction at the foreword of the book but, really, who needs introduction to such a classic tale? Still, J.K. Rowling, if you’re reading this – we’d love to work with you!

We’ve also decided to move forward with The Machine Stops by E. M. Forster but that book will now come after we complete work on The Wind in the Willows.

I will have my other Kafka project, The Hunter Gracchus, completed for CODEX as well but I will save those details for a future post.

Back to the bindery — I’ve orders to fill!