The Old Stile Press ... the next ten years

In January I visited Frances and Nicolas McDowall in the beautiful Wye Valley in Wales. And I was unable to leave - for the snow fell deeper and deeper around the house. But as the electricity petered out, and supplies of gin depleted, I was not short of reading-matter. I hunched by the fire, carefully cradling enormous hand-printed folios of works by John Donne, Dylan Thomas and many other writers. The purpose of my visit was to catalogue the prodigious output of the MacDowalls’ Old Stile Press during the last ten years.

The press was founded in 1979, and an earlier bibliography, The Old Stile Press in the Twentieth Century (compiled by Dorothy Harrop), covers publications up to the millennium. Since then the press has continued to issue titles prodigiously: the artist Rigby Graham notes that publications have grown ‘larger and more lavish’ with the passing years. The latest instalment, The Old Stile Press … the next ten years, surveys this recent work. It includes the stunning edition of Arthur Waley’s Chinese Poems with wood block prints by the wonderful Ralph Kiggell; the libretto of Benjamin Britten’s Christmas Sequence with woodcuts by Angela Lemaire, and The Abstract Garden, a ground-breaking collaboration between printer Nicolas McDowall, poet Philip Gross, and wood engraver Peter Reddick.

Frances and Nicolas McDowall are adamant that art is inseparable from life. These books arise from conversations with friends and shared enthusiasms. The wide variety of works collected together in this bibliography demonstrate what can be achieved when books are approached with passion and perhaps, on occasion, slight folly - qualities which are rarely glimpsed within the limits of commercially-driven corporations. Once my fingers had recovered from frostbite, I wrote a brief introduction to the work of the press, which is presented here alongside Nicolas' revelations about each book's genesis, and Frances' feature on the state of book collecting.



Above is the wonderful painting of the Old Stile Press demesne by Clive Hicks-Jenkins which graces the cover. The edition is limited to 1000 copies, and the first 250 come with a jeu d’esprit printed at the press, ‘Welcome to Spring’ by Gavin Douglas (c. 1510) illustrated with a border decoration by Eric Gill. The Old Stile Press … the next ten years is priced at £45 and is available (plus £4 p&p in UK) from the Old Stile Press.

Here’s to the next ten years!

Old Stile Press: Figures in a Landscape

My first port of call this year was The Old Stile Press in the beautiful Wye Valley. Frances and Nicolas McDowall, who have been publishing books since 1979, invited me to come and look at their recent titles, and discuss compiling a bibliography to extend a history of the Press first published at the millennium.

Snow fell on the day I arrived, transforming the earthy winter tones of the Forest of Dene (red and orange lichen on the trees, sere growth along the river banks) into a monochrome view worthy of a wood engraving. The Wye wound its dark eddies through pristine snowdrifts in which, as the cold intensified, crystal aggregated to crystal until each flake was visible, large as an eye and intricate as a fern leaf.

Frances McDowall collects plant fibres from the fields and combines them with local spring water, creating the paper for many of the books that Nicolas designs and prints. This splendid partnership offers many artists a rare opportunity to experiment with different print processes and exploit the possibilities of the book form. The impressive list of titles ranges from a miniature haiku collection to, most recently, an ambitious production of Peter Schaffer's Equus, bursting with exuberant multi-media images by Clive Hicks-Jenkins.


A Neo-Romantic sensibility is evident in many of the books. Whether the artist’s work takes shape through colourful figurative linocuts or more sedate engravings of seashells, trees and other natural forms, it seems imbued with what the Inuit call inue or "soul". The mystical elements of the landscape are expressed particularly strongly by the exceptional printmaker Angela Lemaire, whether in the mountain that swallows up a whole generation of children in The Pyed Pyper, or in the Scottish Border landscapes haunted by faeries and ghosts in Secret Commonwealth, a seventeenth-century account of the uncanny by Robert Kirk.