A Load of Unicorn

Caxton's Unicorn paper watermark






"In the middle of the workshop stood the press, a great wooden erection secured between two upright posts that ran from floor to ceiling.  Bendy gazed at it, full of awe.  He had seen a press before; the binder who bound books for the Crowing Cock had one of the same shape -- with a heavy board that moved up and down by a big vertical screw.  But the binder's press was tiny.  This was a monster."

" 'Of course the press is no new thing,' said Caxton. 'It is the type which is new.  The old way of pressing paper on to a carved block is useless for books; you need a new block for every page. Now we have all the letters of the alphabet cast in metal, each letter separate, and we build up a page word by word and letter by letter.  When we have printed enough copies we pull the type to pieces again ready to set up for another page.  Come and see for yourselves.'  "

The Load of Unicorn  Cynthia Harnett  (text and illustrations) 

Poet of the dawn

"An old man in a lodge within a park;
The chamber walls depicted all around
With portraitures of huntsman, hawk and hound,
And the hurt deer.   He listeneth to the lark,
Whose song comes with the sunshine through the dark
Of painted glass in leaden lattice bound;
He listeneth and laugheth at the sound,
Then writeth in a book like any clerk.

He is the poet of the dawn, who wrote
The Canterbury Tales, and his old age
Made beautiful with song; and as I read
I hear the crowing cock, I hear the note
Of lark and linnet, and from every page
Rise odours of ploughed field or flowery mead."

Chaucer  Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

"Benighted Travellers"

"A winding stair, a chamber arched with stone,
A grey stone fireplace with an open hearth,
A candle and a written page.
Il Penseroso's Platonist toiled on
In some like chamber, shadowing forth
How the daemonic rage
Imagined everything.
Benighted travellers
From markets and from fairs
Have seen his midnight candle glimmering."

From Meditations in Time of Civil War  W. B. Yeats

"Or let my Lamp at midnight hour,
Be seen in som high lonely Towr,
Where I may oft out-watch the Bear,… "

Il Penseroso  John Milton

Who was Warrender Chase?

"God knows where I got Warrender Chase from; he was based on no one that I knew.

I know only that the night I started writing Warrender Chase I had been alone at a table in a restaurant near Kensington High Street Underground eating my supper.  I rarely ate out alone, but I must have found myself in funds that day.  I was going about my proper business, eating my supper while listening-in to the conversation at the next table.  One of them said, 'There we were all gathered in the living-room, waiting for him.'

It was all I needed.  That was the start of Warrender Chase, the first chapter.  All the rest sprang from that phrase.

But I invented for my Warrender a war record, a distinguished one, in Burma, and managed to make it really credible even although I filled in the war bit with a very few strokes, knowing, in fact, so little about the war in Burma.  It astonished me later to find how the readers found Warrender's war record so convincing and full when I had said so little -- one real war veteran of Burma wrote to say how realistic he found it -- but since then I've come to learn for myself how little one needs, in the art of writing, to convey the lot, and how a lot of words, on the other hand, can convey so little…..

All these years since, the critics have been asking whether Warrender was in love with his nephew.  How do I know?  Warrender Chase never existed, he is only some hundreds of words, some punctuation, sentences, paragraphs, marks on the page.  If I had conceived Warrender Chase's motives as a psychological study I would have said so.  But I didn't go in for motives, I never have."

Loitering with Intent   Muriel Spark

A reader at the Lisbon Liceu

"He had slim hands with long, finely shaped fingers, as if they had been created to turn the pages of precious old books.  With these fingers, he now leafed through Prado's book.  But he didn't read it; moving the pages was like a ritual to bring back the distant past.

'All the things he [Amadeu de Prado] had read when he entered crossed the threshold of the Liceu at the age of ten in his small, tailor-made frock coat!  Many of us caught ourselves secretly calculating whether we could keep up with him.  And then, after class, he sat in the library soaking up all the thick books, page after page,  line after line.  He had an incredible memory and an incredibly concentrated, rapt look on his face when reading.  "When Amadeu finishes reading a book," said another teacher, "it has no more letters.  He devours not only the meaning, but also the printer's ink."

'That's how it was: the books seemed to disappear inside him, leaving empty husks on the shelf afterwards'. "

Night Train to Lisbon   Pascal Mercier, trans. B. Harshaw