Posts from the “Books” Category
31/10/2009 No comments

Reynolds Stone exhibition in London: See why we know his work, if not his name

GOOD piece in The Times about Reynolds Stone (1909-1979), one of the greatest 20th century letter-cutters and engravers, who lived in the old rectory at Litton Cheney. He’s not so well known these days (I think the first time I ever heard his name was reporting at Bridport magistrates’ court in the mid-1990s, when somebody was up for stealing books from his library), but as The Times points out, most people in this country possess one of Stone’s works of art:

“The British passport, designed by Stone in 1955, bears his engraving of the royal coat of arms and his elegant lettering.”

There’s a centenary exhibition of Stone’s work coming up in London. Reynolds Stone: Lettering, Logos and Landscapes, runs from Nov 6-21, Tues-Fri, 11am-4pm, Sat 10.30am-6pm, at Schneideman Gallery, 331 Portobello Rd, London W10 (0208 354 7365).

You can read the piece in The Times by clicking on this link, or there’s a website run by Stone’s estate at www.reynoldsstone.co.uk 

Various Dorset connections continue: Stone’s son Humphrey, for example, designed the excellent Dovecote Press series Discover Dorset; while one of his disciples, the Bridport graphic designer and carver Michael Harvey, now publishes entertainingly unusual photographic books about subjects such as bicycles and fire hydrants…
23/10/2009 1 Comment

The tree you could drink beer inside, and other stories about Dorset’s oldest inhabitants

Review of The Great Trees of Dorset, by Andrew Pollard & Emma Brawn, with Photographs by Colin Varndell (Dovecote Press, £9.95 paperback, £16.95 hardback)

THERE ARE many things to stop and wonder at in The Great Trees of Dorset, including the fact that the huge yew tree in Broadwindsor churchyard may be more than 2,000 years old… Which would take us back to the Roman invasions of Dorset. Start thinking about that, and it’s impossible not also to start thinking about the yew as some kind of historic personage. The oldest living thing in Dorset, perhaps? If only it could speak! What changes it must have seen and felt! What stories it could tell!

The authors of this book definitely think in this way. Their words drift off towards personification, as if trees really were people. Discussing the changes wrought in the wake of the Dissolution of the Monasteries in the 1530s and the Civil War a century later, Pollard and Brawn (what a great muscular pair of names!) note: “There were certainly winners and losers for Dorset’s trees throughout this period…” and you think, what a genuinely charming idea it is, to tell the story of Dorset from the point of view of its trees, and, what a pity it is there aren’t more old trees left. Really old oaks, say, with large girths and mossy serpentine branches. Pollard and Brawn write: “We… probably have about 1000 veteran oaks, of whom [note that whom!] fewer than 200 are truly ancient. Even this may well be a hopeful estimate. This is an extremely low number and we should ask ourselves: how worried would we be if there were less than 200 individuals left of an orchid species?” One of the greatest individuals left is Billy Wilkins, who (they’ve got me at it now) lives in Melbury Park near Evershot, not far from the A37. His girth is 11.6 metres.

Great Trees cover web

 

It’s to celebrate trees like Billy, and to stimulate interest in the welfare of Dorset’s veteran trees, that The Great Trees has been published. Pollard and Brawn both work for the Dorset Wildlife Trust, and their book grows out of the extensive research they’ve done in recent years for the county’s Greenwood Trees Project. The aim of this project, supported by the Heritage Lottery Fund, is to understand, celebrate and conserve Dorset’s great trees (past, present and future). Poems, songs, and pictures by schoolchildren feature throughout the book and reflect public involvement in the Greenwood scheme. Hundreds of fibrous roots have fed the authors and it shows. Leaf through their book and memorable details abound.

Did you know, for example, that the first recorded reference to children playing conkers isn’t until 1848? Did children really not play conkers before then? (Maybe so, because the horse chestnut is not a native tree; it dates back in Dorset about 220 years…) Or that cider in Dorset is first mentioned Read more
29/09/2009 No comments

Clare and Chevalier sell out in Bridport

Six weeks to go to the start of the Bridport Literary Festival and there’s no tickets left for events featuring authors Tracy Chevalier and Horatio Clare.

I suppose Chevalier was always going to be popular; her new novel Remarkable Creatures is about the great Lyme Regis fossil hunter Mary Anning.

But Clare’s a surprise, with his book A Single Swallow. He’s supposed to be appearing in front of 30 people at Wild and Homeless Books in South Street, Bridport. Could he now be moved over the road to face a bigger crowd at Bridport Arts Centre?

There’s something heartening about people’s apparent hunger to hear more about swallows. There’s two very appealing lines – written by a child – quoted in Tom Paulin’s Faber Book of Vernacular Verse:

“The swallow is a migratory bird. He have a roundy head”.

I’m quoting from memory. I love that word “roundy”.