PLAISTER PRESS



 Plaister Press is now launched and the website Plaister Press has finally gone public after delays caused by the poor web builder being caught up in the Christ Church earthquake. Thankfully he wasn't hurt.
There was a piece in the Bookseller Bookseller Article last week that gave rise to some interesting discussions. One agent thought there would be many authors in the future wanting to bring their out-of-print books back into print and stressed how important it was to get publishers to revert the rights to make this possible. I'd like to think we would be known as 'author publishers'.

JAPAN

Haunted by the grotesque and terrifying images of the debris left behind by the Japanese earthquake and tsunami this week, I revisited the sketches I'd done during my only visit to Japan back in the late 1980's when I'd glimpsed something of their landscape, history, art, religion and everyday life. I thought I'd post a few up in sympathy for the Japanese people at this time:

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GOING TO PRESS

This week I went with typographic designer, Lisa Kirkham and her two children Hannah and Jan, to Lavenham Press to watch the start of the print of The Little White Sprite. Here's a clip of pages from my book rattling through the great Heidelberg machine at 15,000 sheets an hour: Heidelberg press printing Little White Sprite

It seemed amazing that all those watercolours I'd mixed together on my palette when I did the illustrations - yellow ocres, raw umbers, rose madders, red iron oxides, cobalt violets, veridians and more, were reproduced from these four simple colour plates, black, cyan, magenta and yellow.

In minutes there was a great pile of Little White Sprite sheets all printed on one side, waiting to dry before being printed on the other side.

Then we saw the the folding machine, the gluing machine, the cover laminating machine,

and the wonderful stiching machine. It could have been a factory owned by Willy Wonker.

Afterwards we went to the Swan Inn for drinks and snacks before returning home with the same number of children we'd started out with.

Pictures thanks to Jan.

WORDS

Every picture book writer knows the difficulties that arise when an editor asks for textual changes - just the removal of a few words or a sentence or two added. Suddenly all those carefully balanced words, dovetailed in with images start to teeter and fall, leaving a jumble on the page. It can take a long time to build them back into a new shape.
     Because the picture book text is so minimal, even the smallest of changes, like these made to spread 10 of The Little White Sprite, can create a knock-on effect.

I decided to move 'up', from it's dominant position at the end of the first line and replaced it with 'high' ('up' had held that position in the previous spread and it was now the turn of 'high'). It was only when I removed 'hollow' because it's meaning was not precise enough - you can't climb a ' hollow' - and replaced it with 'So we climbed up inside the Warty tree' that I found 'up' had nudged its way back onto the page again. Although it was one 'up' too many I couldn't get rid of it. Reluctantly I allowed it to stay.

Small words can be bothersome. Read about 'but' at http://www.paulcoltman.blogspot.com/

SNOWDROPS

There's a stream near the River Rother where snowdrops grow wild in great white drifts on the banks.
For years I've gone there to see them. They come at a time of year when I can find a bit of stillness after the turmoil of Christmas. I associate them with bare, empty months when I can work again and a stillness that's becoming harder and harder to capture in our age of  manic social networking.
There's a poem about them on: http://www.paulcoltman.blogspot.com/

HIERONYMOUS BOSCH WE CAN DO IT

http://www.bbc.co.uk/learningzone/clips/paul-coltman-hieronymous-bosch-we-can-do-it-poem-only/1525.html

My father, Paul Coltman (1917-2003) 's poem Hieronymous Bosch We Can Do It, is recorded in the above clip for pupils studying the effects of atomic weapons on individuals. The poem is set to images of the bombs dropped in 1945 on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The first part of the clip with Robert Oppenheimer, father of the atomic bomb, uttering the words "Now I am death, the destroyer of worlds" has mysteriously been removed.

Hieronymous Bosch We Can Do It  is the first poem in A Momentary Stay published by Harry Chambers/ Peterloo Poets.  Harry Chambers was  to publish a posthumous volume of my father's poems but this wonderful publishing house closed down before the book appeared. Harry Chambers sent me the remaining copies of A Momentary Stay in a box, packaged with other books of poetry - the most expensive packaging ever.
Here are two evaluations of Paul Coltman's poetry:
Martin Ward wrote in 2010:
'Paul Coltman has a range of gifts: an ironic and very individual take on the world and its inhabitants, and a constantly exercised sense of the integration of our lives both with times past and with the natural environment, the love of which he stimulates in the reader with tender observations. He was of the generation of 1939-1945, and although he is not a "war poet", warfare provides a recurring theme and subtext, and a plentiful source of imagery throughout his work. Passing on from 1945, he and his poetry entered the apocalyptic age of the cold war and nuclear exchange, furnishing, for the next phase of his output, another stream of concern and of imagery.'

Raphaella Serfati wrote in 2011 about the Hieronymous Bosch We Can Do It clip :
'The interview with Oppenheimer left a strong impact on me and the combination of words and image was very impressive. But I must admit that I was mostly struck by your father's words, meaning, by the poem itself. It's so powerful. I guess it's because of the combination of "positive" words such as "miracles", "astonish" and "celebrate" with the terror and dread of the bomb (which is not mentioned in the text itself, if I am not mistaken, but is only inferred from the context). It's almost as if your father still talks about Nature (as you said he used to), describing a phenomenon which represents or expresses the Sublime, and at the same time, one cannot ignore the presence of the Human parameter in this terrible formula, as an intervening force that shapes a new, modern Nature...' 

I will be posting my father's poems on: paulcoltman.blogspot.com

THE CHILDREN OF GREEN KNOWE

I first became acquainted with the  Green Knowe books by Lucy Boston after visiting the Manor at Hemmingford Grey; the setting for these magical stories. 

Now there's a Julian Fellowes film , From Time to Time, based on the second book in the series, The Chimneys of Green  Knowe. Here's a trailer: Julian Fellowes Interview

    Just before Christmas I went to a private showing of  it at the Cambridge Arts Picture House, when Diana Boston, Lucy's daughter-in-law, gave an introductory talk. Despite there being no mention of Green Knowe in the title of the film, a lot of Green Knowe fans still got to hear about it and a larger auditorium had to be requisitioned. Diana told us some interesting facts about the film - that she herself makes a brief appearance in the party scene, that Julian Fellowes was already beginning to think about Downton Abbey during the making of this film. And I was amazed to learn that From Time to Time had had no publicity; was not on general release - just showing in village halls despite having a star cast: Maggie Smith, Hugh Bonneville and Timothy Spall.

But perhaps that will now all change after the showing on Boxing Day TV.