Areté Editions

16/12/2024

Benjamin Button numbered edition is about to go out the door! Oz has, more or less been finished and now Benjamin follows. Both books have been a labour of love for me, both years in the making. Nice to see your children leave for new homes! marcelo

22/11/2024

https://fb.watch/w0sgsWriOl/ Thanks! Crossed fingers.

07/11/2024

Our lettered edition of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button! Dave McKean has made seventeen stunning three-colour relief letterpress prints for our seventy-two page edition. Three of them are over two pages and are bound into the book on tabs so that they open flat. Printed in three colours! For this edition Dave has done amazing sketches within the book. They look great!

Here's some of the original art remarques that Dave has done:

04/11/2024

We’ve had time to reflect on the design of the Numbered Edition of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button since it went on sale, and have continued to develop it. Freya Scott of Paperwilds, in consultation with Dave McKean and Rich Tong, made us a new marbled paper. It’s so good that we had to change the leather too. We think that through this combination of colours, we have created a much nicer and bolder edition. The book is now being bound in quarter black goatskin with the new marbled paper on the front and back boards. And there are two versions of the Numbered edition, each being identical except for the black goatskin leather label on the front board.

One has the original question mark design, foil-blocked in cream and gold.

The other has an hourglass design which is, again, foil-blocked in cream and gold.

Both versions have the same slipcase, which is covered in a teal book cloth, foil-blocked with a Dave McKean design in black and cream and lined with black suedel.

The binding of the Lettered Edition remains unchanged. It will be fully bound with a square spine in chocolate-brown Canada Grain cowhide. There will be two foil-blocking passes on the front board, one in black and one in cream. There will also be one pass of cream on the spine. All three edges of the pages will be gilded. It will come in a cloth-covered solander box with a large leather label fixed to the front. The label is foil-blocked in three passes, with a further pass in black to the spine.

The Lettered Edition is remarqued with an original Dave McKean illustration.

Dave has made seventeen stunning three-colour relief prints for both editions of this seventy-two page book. Three of them are over two pages and are bound into the book on tabs, so that they open flat.

Both editions have been letterpress printed in three colours by Phil Abel and Robert Hetherington at Hand & Eye Editions on a Heidelberg cylinder press. They are typeset in Baskerville and the page size is 280 x 200 mm / 11 x 7.8 in.

The Numbered Edition has been printed on Munken 150 gsm and the Lettered on Liber Charta 170 gsm.

Please visit our website, where we have more photos and a shop.

02/11/2024

For the last three years we have been working with Rich Tong at https://www.lyrasbooks.com creating a fabulous Fine Press version of Paulo Coelho's best selling book The Alchemist! And this week it comes to fruition. I'm really proud of the work that, not only myself, but award winning artist Gary Gianni and Rich has done bringing this extraordinary book to the world. You can purchase the book through a lottery, so everyone will have a chance to obtain a copy, all details are on Lyra's web site: https://www.lyrasbooks.com/the-alchemist-lyras-press/ If you are a fan of this wonderful story you will not get a better Fine, Letterpress hand made edition of the book! Check it out! marcelo

15/10/2024

We are pleased, honoured and humbled to reveal that the Frozen Hell numbered edition has been shortlisted for the Best British Book by British Book Design & Production Awards for this year! Well done Rich Tong and Phil Abel for extraordinary bindings and print making (and it’s nicely designed too!).

05/10/2024

BRAVE NEW WORLD is one of the most important novels of the 20th century.

Finally, a Fine Letterpress edition of Brave New World! Coming soon from ARETE EDITIONS.

'Man is now the victim of his own technology' - Aldous Huxley.

‘It's possible to argue that Huxley got more right than his fellow dystopian, George Orwell. That was definitely the opinion of the great SF writer JG Ballard. Ballard said: "Huxley's greatest novel, Brave New World , is a far shrewder guess at the likely shape of a future tyranny than Orwell's vision of Stalinist terror in Nineteen Eighty-Four."

The crucial point for Ballard was that Huxley described a world in which humanity welcomed its enslavement. In Nineteen-Eighty-Four, Big Brother is an oppressor, stamping a boot forever on a human face. In Brave New World, thanks to mood-altering drugs, the distractions of mass media technology, and ready access to s*xual gratification, most people don't even realise that they have no freedom. In this society, discontent is quelled by advertising, medication, s*x and entertainment. Which really does sound quite familiar. So familiar (Huxley also describes such modern-seeming phenomena as test-tube babies and Virtual Reality cinema) that it's hard to believe Brave New World was written in the early 1930s’ (BBC Dangerous visions).

Brave New World is an astonishingly prescient novel, foretelling advances in each of these areas that were as much as a half-century away.

Set in London in 2540, the 7th century After Ford, Brave New World presents a future in which genetically engineered babies are produced on assembly lines, the social and economic divide between the haves and the have nots is legally enforced and discontent is quelled by advertising, medication, s*x and entertainment.

The novel proved to be a massive critical and commercial success, cementing Huxley’s place as one of the most important writers of the era. And it is also acknowledged to be one of the most important novels of the last 100 years.

We have, for the last two and a half years, been working with one of the pioneers of the ‘Pop Art’ movement of the ‘60’s; Allen Jones. Known for his brightly coloured paintings, prints and, sometimes infamous, sculptures, he is one of the last living artists from that time. Allen has produced over 20 colour prints and many black and white images for Arete’s Brave New World. Concentrating on the human relationships and the characters in his own unique voice, Allen Jones has managed to find a vision of the book not explored before.

We feel he has created an extraordinary book. Rich Tong, a long admirer of Allen’s paintings since his art school days, has been thrilled to work with the artist for the last year creating a book which is also a piece of art!

20/09/2024

Something Rich and I did earlier in the year!

05/09/2024

News from Rich!!!

24/07/2024

We have a number of books in the pipeline and one we hope to announce imminently, and we have Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World coming very soon, the first time for fifty years that a Fine letterpress version has been created.

‘Ensconced in his recently purchased villa in the South of France, in late 1931 Huxley began work on what is now widely considered to be one of the Western canon's most important novels. Published in 1932, Brave New World marks the apogee of Huxley’s abilities as a satirist. The world it presents, however, is viewed through a much darker lens, informed by the writer’s growing anxieties about the direction of political, social and scientific progress. Brave New World is also an astonishingly prescient novel, foretelling advances in each of these areas that were as much as a half-century away.
Set in London in 2540, the 7th century After Ford, Brave New World presents a future in which genetically engineered babies are produced on assembly lines, the social and economic divide between the haves and the have nots is legally enforced and discontent is quelled by advertising, medication, s*x and entertainment.’
From Aldous Huxley Biography.com.

We have, for the last two years, been working with one of the pioneers of the ‘Pop Art’ movement of the ‘60’s; Allen Jones. Known for his brightly coloured paintings, prints and, sometimes infamous, sculptures, he is one of the last living artists from that time. He has produced over 20 colour prints and many black and white images for the story. Concentrating on the human relationships and the characters in his own unique voice, Allen Jones has managed to find a vision of the book not explored before. We feel he has created an extraordinary book.

17/06/2024

FROZEN HELL! Final call out for change of address. Please notify us if you have changed your address since you ordered Frozen Hell numbered editions, many thanks for your patience and support! It is on it's way!!

11/06/2024

We’ve all been working hard behind the scenes and we’ll have some terrific news coming very soon! However, for now...

Frozen Hell IMPORTANT.

Finally! The numbered edition of Frozen Hell is about to be shipped! If any of you that have ordered a book, I know it was a while ago now, and have moved or changed address PLEASE NOTIFY US!!

Ludlow’s are hoping to start sending the books out early next week. Phil is away on holiday next week too, so if you have a change of address, please let us know sooner than later.

The Lettered/Roman edition will be a little while longer as it is much more complicated and we wanted to get the Numbered out of the way first. The book blocks (the really complicated bit) are finished. The leather is all prepped for the boxes and books will be ready to go. Soon!

25/04/2024

Frozen Hell update! We've been busy over the last few weeks, production on Frozen Hell and Lyra's Oz, printing Benjamin Button and working out our future books. Frozen Hell has a very complex interior production which has taken an awful lot longer for the craftspeople at Ludlow Bookbinders, these clips, unedited, will give you a sense of putting in twenty two foldouts, double page and single page plates that need to be sewn into the book! It is proving VERY time consuming.

18/04/2024

Greg has been elected to be included into the Society of Illustrators Hall of Fame!! An extraordinary achievement! Well done Greg!

01/04/2024

And here’s another teaser! For Lud-in-the Mist by Hope Mirrlees, one of the most influential fantasy novels in the last few decades, originally only known by authors such as Neil Gaiman, now acknowledged as a towering masterpiece. This is the first Fine Press edition of the book, extraordinarily illustrated by Scott McKowen using scratchboard technique, which is perfect for letterpress print making:

01/04/2024

A teaser, Brave New World by Aldous Huxley has not had a Fine Press edition for over fifty years that I know of.

We have, for the last two years, been working with one of the pioneers of the ‘Pop Art’ movement of the ‘60’s; Allen Jones. Known for his brightly coloured paintings, prints and, sometimes infamous, sculptures, he is one of the last living artists from that time. He has produced over 20 prints for the story. Concentrating on the human relationships and the characters in his own unique voice, Allen Jones has managed to find vision of the book not explored before. We feel he has created an extraordinary book.

Here is a letterpress print of the scene that shocks the audience watching, then: ‘Laughter broke out, enormous, almost hysterical, peal after peal, as though it would never stop. My father–and it was the Director! My father! Oh Ford, oh Ford! That was really too good. The whooping and the roaring renewed themselves, faces seemed on the point of disintegration, tears were streaming. Six more test-tubes of spermatozoa were upset. My father!’

06/03/2024

While I work on getting Oz together for Rich’s Lyra, we are working on other books!

One of them is Lud-in-the-Mist by Hope Mirrlees, Neil Gaiman says; Lud as "one of the finest [fantasy novels] in the English language.... It is a little golden miracle of a book." He described Mirrlees's writing as "elegant, supple, effective and haunting: the author demands a great deal from her readers, which she repays many times over." He says that it is one of his top ten favourite books.

Scott McKowen is the illustrator for the novel, he is creating over thirty, letterpress relief print illustrations for the book! Here he shows us his tools and work in progress of the finished piece: ‘My tools are all here — no.11 x-acto blade, an engraving burin when I need an even finer line, an old Castel-Faber technical pen with black ink (for correcting errors), magnifying lupe attached to the swing-arm of an old desk lamp (held on with jury-rigged plastic plumbing hardware), and a brush for sweeping away the insidious ink dust….’

12/02/2024

Phil, master printer and partner/creator of Arete Editions and private press publisher of Hand & Eye editions has a brilliant interview and offers insights in to letterpress printing at collectable book vault, not to be missed! And they are giving away some free stuff donated by us! See now at:

Phil Abel of Hand and Eye, Lyra's Books and Areté Editions - Letterpress Printer Phil Abel is an accomplished and sought-after letterpress printer, based in London, who has been mastering his craft for decades. He currently releases his own projects under the Hand and Eye imprint and is also the pr...