Although we don't do commercial work at Incline Press, by which I mean taking orders for jobbing printing as it is properly called, I do have a few customers to whom I am happy to say yes.  Prime among the few is Chetham's Library in Manchester, the oldest extant public library in the country, founded in the 1650s.

At present they are running a project to digitise much of their ephemera, mostly kept in scrapbooks collected or donated from a large number of sources over a very long period of time. As part of the process, aimed at making the material more visible especially to the people of the Manchester region, there have been a number of public events. The latest of these was a story-telling session in the Library last Saturday (27 Jan 2018), with members of the Manchester Story-Tellers Guild spinning tales based on the chapbooks in the Chetham's collection.

As part of the event we were commissioned to print a new version of an old chapbook in the collection. We  chose an edition of Aesop's Fables, undated but probably from the 1790s. We retained the original chapbook style, and used magnesium plates made from the original illustrations to keep the rough-hewn appearance of each of the fables. Susana Sanchez-Gonzalez, who is in charge of the project, wrote an explanatory introduction. New type for hand-setting the text came from the Effra Monotype Foundry, north of York, and that was mixed with some Victorian decorated initials and dashes from our own typecases.

Packaging is not something we are usually concerned with, but these were to be sold in the standard cellophane bag. So the opening text had to go on the back cover, resulting in the pages being imposed backwards so to speak! But it works nicely, and copies can be had either by calling into the Library with a £5 note ready, or from our Shop from £6, postage included.