A new anthology of Burns’ most lovely songs.

Twenty of Burns’ poems illustrated with a four-colour frontispiece by Petra Wonham, decorated with tailpieces by Thomas Bewick. It is limited to an edition of less than 175 copies, hardbacked with a cloth spine and decorated paper over boards from Helen Morley of Wigtown Press. Printed on machine made paper from Wookey Hole Mill (in storage since the 1960s), and hand set in Monotype Scotch roman and italic, with Stephenson Blake’s Modern No 20 for display.

Back in 2013 we published a chapbook: A Garland of Love Songs by Robert Burns. It was typeset and bound by Nick Sadnytsky, a student at Bennington College in Vermont, USA. He came to us that snowy winter to learn a little more about the processes of letterpress printing and making books. That is now out of print so we have made a new and expanded edition. This has been done with the help of Petra Wonham who came to us from Edinburgh for a month with the same intent. As well as having a strong hand in choosing the 20 pieces in this collection and doing the bulk of the typesetting, she made a four-colour lino-cut for the frontispiece.

As the photos show, this is a book of love poems and songs. There is also a four page introduction, and 15 vignettes by Thomas Bewick. In this we are following the 1808 edition of Burns printed and published by William Davison of Alnwick, whose glossary has been used for the Englishing of the texts. That Englishing is done for the ease of immediate reading, and recommendations for finding the originals are made in the introduction; you will also find there titles of CDs where you can hear them sung.

The edition was supposed to be 175 copies but due to a piece of incredible stupidity carried out by the scallywag operating the paper trimmer, the edition has been reduced by about fifty copies. We would give him a journeyman Union Card and send him on his way to find a job with any rat shop that might take him, but we are not planning to close down just yet and so he is still the boss.