I produce letterpress cards, prints and ephemera, all printed with hand-set metal type and antique image blocks, as well as chapbooks, artworks and sundry curiosities; my home is in the borderlands of England and Wales. I work from home in Cusop Dingle, about a mile outside Hay-on-Wye.
The name of my imprint, fallowpages, takes its inspiration from 'Harmas', the home of the French naturalist Jean-Henri Fabre. ‘Harmas’ means, in Provençal, a plot of uncultivated land, and indeed, Fabre used to keep a strip of just that in his garden to see what turned up. The name seemed a good fit for my odds, ends and various excursions, which often make use of chance finds and unexpected arrivals.
This site has a sample of some of my work, but please visit my more comprehensive fallowpages site, and get in touch if anything you see there appeals but is not available here. Cards are £4, prints generally £15-£25 and can be surface mounted on suitable mountboard for a little extra. I can be found fortnightly (on the 1st, 3rd & occasional 5th weeks of the month) at a stall in the Butter Market at Hay's Thursday market, as well as Hay's Saturday & special markets.
I also print business cards, compliments cards, bookmarks and suchlike to order (take a look at the Commissions section for some examples), so do get in touch if you are interested, though please note I'm not really set up to do wedding invitations. In the digital realm I also do layout and typesetting, so if you have content which needs turning into a book I can produce a print-ready PDF for you (see Book Design & Layout for some recent work).
A note on my practice. I print only from hand-set metal type and antique image blocks. I like the element of chance that comes with finding old image blocks and type and then deciding how to best put them to use. As such, this is a continuation of an artistic choice that began with my series of artist’s books – Colva Books – which I made between 2002-2014, in which chance finds – whether of text, artefact, or photographs – informed their content and design. The fun, the skill, and the magic lies in reinterpreting what is already with us and giving it new life.
Graeme Hobbs