Mike Sims: Hey Julia, feels good, doesn’t it, to be launching the second set of Handbooks with such an illustrious set of authors and illustrators? It’s been an interesting combination of long-laid plans working beautifully, some serendipitously – plus some opportunistic scouting-out as our deadlines neared. Is that how it seems to you?
Julia Bird: Absolutely! Our fifth author in this set was confirmed about 24 hours before our design deadline – but I think it’s quite okay for us to work like this. We’re not one of the big five publishing houses with our 2028 Christmas bestsellers already on the slate – we’re a tiny little art press who can afford to be a bit will-o-the-wispy about our approaches to how we publish. It’s fine for us to leave space for surprise.
It’s about to get a bit more serious though. I have today been to London Graphic Centre to get one of every type of glue they sell so we can test them in advance of our forthcoming Handbook-making session. Do you remember how that went last time? Have you blocked it out?
MS: Certainly I (we!) have blocked out a prodigious amount of time over several weekends to make the books, which are hand-assembled from sections supplied by our printer. Is it four or five glueings per book? (That I have also blocked out.) We learned a great deal about this part of the job with the first set of Handbooks, not least that very good friends make extraordinarily dedicated helpers-out – community publishing!
Do you think of the five titles in our second set of Handbooks as eclectic or that they converge in interesting, unexpected ways?
JB: It amuses me that we’ve got two Keatsian echoes in this set of books: Keats and his restless legs show up in Emily’s book, and Adam’s title is very Keatsian. That occurred without us talking to our authors at all about our interest in / parasocial relationship with Keats. He just pops up!
I’m so looking forward to the Free Verse Poetry Book & Magazine Fair this year – I really enjoy being part of this shoestring community where people invest enormous amounts of energy into making and selling their books for love. Or perhaps we’ll make our fortunes this year, what do you think?
MS: There will be the good fortune of excellent conversation about the many fine books on show – not only ours! – and, we hope, plenty of sales! I think it was at last year’s Free Verse we learned that our best sales trick is the ‘performance’ of Handbooks – the book thrown wide as if we’re singing the big number in an opera. Handbooks are books of course, but they’re Old-School-ish too – folded scrolls, really. Adam’s picture book, This Thing of Beauty, Ian Cowmeadow’s Little Mousetraps, and A History of Chance Meetings by Alex MacDonald and Aisha Farr, typify this, but Rashed Aqrabawi’s Christ, Mountain Road and Emily Cooper’s Tapped also wind their narratives over our long white paper pathways.
I am really looking forward to hearing what people think! We had a nice comment about our sweet-wrapper colourways, devised by designer Liam Relph, at last year’s Free Verse, didn’t we?
JB: Someone came up to us and said ‘I saw your books from the other side of the fair and they looked so good I had to come and investigate’. Literally: our eyes met across a crowded room!
We incorporated that performance ta-dah moment into the bookmaking workshops we ran over this last year, didn’t we? That was unexpected, a series of friendly invitations to run bookmaking workshops for Poetry in Aldeburgh, Write & Shine, Keats House and the like, which arose directly from publishing the first set of books. What have you learnt from running those sessions?
MS: That our flexible fold-out books spark inventive writing and image-making. That with only a little encouragement from us, people readily make their own. And that they also want to buy ours: good!
BOOK your place at Make a Bird Book! – an in-person Write & Shine workshop with Julia Bird and Mike Sims of Blown Rose – make your own bird-themed concertina book. 30 April, Westminster Quaker Meeting House, Leicester Square, WC2N