Perpetua Press, Oxford, 1984
A carefully designed and beautifully printed booklet of poems about the trials and tribulations of working with typesetting and printing presses.
Description: Card covers with pictorial papers wrappers. Octavo: 22 × 15 cm; pp. 11 leaves all but one printed on one side only. Printed from 'Bembo' and 'Old Face Open' (frontispice), 2 illustrations.
Condition: An excellent copy.
Notes: This slim booklet, with a wonderfully minimalist cover, was written by John Frederick Bell (1922–2008), a senior editor at Oxford University Press. The poems were originally published, according to the introduction, in The Lantern, OUP’s house magazine, in 1951–1953. The booklet was printed by the Perpetua Press, a side project of the university printer Vivian Ridler, in an edition of 200 copies, according to the colophon.