Monday was spent puzzling out details on cover treatment and bindings for the regular and deluxe edition of the forthcoming release of The Intruder. The deluxe binding will be done with a calf vellum spine, lightly tooled and spine title, with a still undecided paper finishing the quarter binding. It will be housed in a drop spine box with an additional set of the five big wood engravings done by Jim Westergard. The regular edition will be quarter bound in cloth and paper, possibly cloth and cork – I’ve sent off for samples of something that might work and have inquired about the archival nature of its construction. Might be interesting, reminiscent of a flyrods grip perhaps….

Today was spent finishing the tonal background press runs for the last two big wood engravings. Finally I can put another color of ink on the Vandercook. In order to print the backgrounds in such a subtle color the rollers first had to be purged or any ink that had found its way into the crevasses and pores of the rubber. Half a morning later of inking the press with white ink and a dab of putz and then cleaning it off again three of four times did the trick.

After the tone runs we printed the last page of the book text. Still have a couple pages of the foreword, colophon and title page to go so certainly not done with the black ink yet but closing in.