A Small Press Reborn
I founded the original Basement Press in a small flat ('apartment' to Americans) in Ipswich (England) in 1994. 'Founded' is a rather grand way of saying that I had fallen in love with the Black Art of letterpress printing the year before and bought a cast-iron Model No. 4 press, together with various founts of metal type (it was the time when Stephenson, Blake of Sheffield were selling off the last of their stock).
I called the whole business, with due humility, The Basement Press because I was living in a basement flat, cramming all the block-cutting and printing into a cramped and overstretched kitchen, so that in the circumstances even the term 'small press' seemed unnecessarily grand.
Towards the end of the decade I had to go abroad (not for the first time) to earn a better living than selling wood-engravings could offer. In 2002, by now back in Britain and settled in Colchester (twenty miles away from the original basement, and at street level this time), I took everything out of storage, blew off the dust and started things running again under the slightly updated name of the New Basement Press. Various small books rolled, or trickled, or perhaps clanked, off the various printing machines I could find room for in the replacement kitchen.
The one illustrated below (those with no technical interest in printing are welcome to skip this bit) is a Cropper Charlton proofing press adapted with a rather Heath-Robinsonish home-made tympan and frisket. The cover for Wood-Engraving can be seen set up in the chase. There are also two Adanas, an 8x5 and a Horizontal Quarto, both occasionally used. The Model, alas, had to go. It was a wonderful workhorse, but there was simply no room in the kitchen for the impression handle to operate - at least, not if I wanted to keep room for a dining-table. Even artists have to eat, after all.
Some more ambitious projects have taken me beyond the limits of hand-setting type for a tiny letterpress business operating in half a kitchen. The first of these was a travel book based on the experience of two years working in Malaysia, followed (currently) by the first in a series of fantasy novels. The Malaysian book, A Lull Between Monsoons, appeared under the imprint of The Burrell Press and the novel, Black Bird, White Bird, should appear before too long (watch this space for further developments) under the newly-created imprint of :
At the same time I continue to paint, sometimes in acrylics or watercolour but mostly in oils. All in all, the umbrella heading of The New Basement Press covers a fairly wide range of activities.
Now, before you go on to try the links, a point about what Wikipedia would call disambiguation: I suppose this is as good a place as any to mention that I am not the Peter Gauld FSIA who had a distinguished career as a graphic designer long before I entered the market. And while I am at it, let me apologise to the Basement Press in Dublin who started publishing poetry long before I hit on the same name, to Burrell-Floraprint who publish books on gardening, and to the Green Lion Press (not Green Lion Books) who publish reissues of important scientific source materials. It seems unlikely that anyone would mistake me at work in my cramped kitchen for the current publisher of Isaac Newton's Principia Mathematica, but in my experience if a similarity of names could just conceivably create confusion, then at some point it undoubtedly will.
Green Lion Books
