We’ve produced books of previous shows, High Street and Cliffe. They were concertina books, 14 feet long, and each edition took around 1,300 hand creases. Every single crease had to be accurate to less than a millimetre, to prevent the whole book from adopting a very unattractive drunken skew. In 2007, our wrists cried “Enough!” and we had Public House handbound as a conventional book, by Rachel Ward-Sale at Bookbinders of Lewes.
The book was again a limited edition, this time of 54. It featured prints of each of the twenty pubs in Lewes, as well as some of the pub signs. Using the conventional book format allowed us to feature many of the prints at actual or closer-to-actual size – the page size was a chunky 250 by 330mm. The book was sold at our 2007 exhibition in the Hibbert Room at the historic Westgate Chapel, Lewes. The pubs featured were:
The Kings Head
The Lewes Arms
The Swan
The Elephant & Castle
The Meridian
The Crown
The Black Horse
The Tally Ho
The Pelham Arms
The Royal Oak
Shelleys
The Lansdown
The Brewers Arms
The Volunteer
The White Hart
The John Harvey Tavern
The Rainbow
The Snowdrop
The Lamb
The Gardener’s Arms
The Dorset
Below are some pages from the book; the originals of the prints reproduced there vary in size from 6×8 inches to 20×9 inches.
Lewes Printmakers 