28 la vallée des merveilles

august 09

148mm x 210mm

poems inside flapped pocket with blind embossing

The thousands of rock engravings that surround Mt Bégo, in the Vallée des Merveilles in south-eastern France, are a comparative rarity in that, rather than being produced by a prehistoric hunter-gathering community, instead come from Bronze Age farmers; hence the occurrence in the engravings of metal implements such as ploughs and daggers. I have tried to capture this difference in emphasis in the two poems enclosed here, La Vallée des Merveilles and La Voie Sacrée. The cover design is a blind embossing of one of the engravings from the area.

27 scuggery or 'I wish I had a sister like Ruth'

august 09

120mm x 180mm

36 pages

24 copies

A piece occasioned by the chance find of the 1917 'Chatterbox' annual of stories for schoolchildren. Reading a number of its tales I had the impression that I was actually reading a collection of themes, to which the characters were more or less incidental. Most feature a challenge to a boy or girl's mettle, whether this arrives in the form of adapting to a new school, rescuing a sleepwalker, or journeying through the Canadian muskeg. Hence Scuggery is collated from the original writings entirely on the basis of themes, to which place, situation, character and gender are fully interchangeable.

flowers (cards)

march 09

55mm x 76mm

printed wrapper, silk flowers

Ten of the flowers that I wrote about in Colva Books 17, Flowers, appeared as embroidered silk flowers that were given away with Wix's Kensitas cigarettes in 1934-35. As these silks are still readily available I printed up a few of their folders with my own text replacing the botanical history and cultural notes that appeared in the originals and slipped the silks inside.