A previous installment of this occasional series on book production concerned a novel by Julian Barnes, The noise of time.¹ The book was published in 2016 in London by Jonathan Cape, an imprint of Vintage Publishing, and in turn part of Penguin Random House UK. Read more

We have been assembling the discs, booklets, and packs for our next Hyphen Press Music CD, ‘Musical offering’, to be released on 26 May (in the UK, and a week later in continental Europe). This will be an unusual CD in the series: devoted to one work, with just one other piece (a trio sonata by Buxtehude) added in The Bach Players’ spirit of providing context and variety. J.S. Bach’s Musikalisches Opfer is one of his major pieces, recorded many times. In this recording, the parts of the work – sometimes assumed to have been assembled arbitrarily to suit the music’s first printer – are played here in an order that supports their rhetorical unfolding. Silas Wollston, the groups’ keyboardist, explains this in his essay ‘Bach the orator’, given in the CD booklet. The cover image on the packet comes from Adolph Menzel’s historical painting (1850–2) of the scene of the Musikalisches Opfer (1747). For the first time we have used four-colour printing for the booklet, to do justice to Menzel’s painting. For the packet, as with the rest of the series, we have stuck with two colours. Read more

A couple of months ago, just before Christmas, we published a new book: Winter light, and other poems by Jane Howard. This small book (a single section of 32 pages, stapled and with a jacket wrapped around) collects poems written over many years. The author, who is an old friend of this imprint, is sparing in her production and notably self-critical. In a note at the end of the book she explains: ‘The poems I have chosen here are typically traces of small moments of perception, of those unpredictable occasions when something experienced more observantly or acutely than usual demands to be given form.’ We are very glad to publish this modest, but we think distinguished work. Produced in a small edition, some copies are for general sale. Read more

The Hyphen Press office is closed now until 24 December. This means that during these days we cannot process and send out any orders made from this website for books and CDs. Any orders received now will be attended to promptly in the days immediately after Christmas.

Our Richard Hollis designs for the Whitechapel is perhaps the most anticipated, most delayed work on which we have worked. Christopher Wilson’s book was first announced to the world in November 2012, as due for publication in spring 2013. Since then the work has grown and become elaborated. It is, in part, an experiment in how to discuss graphic design, without any obvious precedent. The author is also the designer, image processor, and page-maker. This concentration of labour in the hands of one person makes the experiment possible, though it also requires a Stakhanovite commitment. The book – main text, notes, pictures, short captions, extended narrative captions, cross-references, appendixes, bibliography, and more – is now done, and we are working on the index; a final proof-reading will follow. With the printer there will be tests for printing pictures on the chosen paper. The binder will make a dummy, and the glueing of the book-block will be tested. We expect to go into material production in January and to publish in April 2017. Your patience is certainly appreciated here. Read more