text selected by Nicolas McDowall, who also took the photographs and wrote the Preface
64pp
372x255mm.
Edition limited to 45 copies numbered and signed.
£125
Latin Memories is the latest of Nicolas' solo excursions. Like The Paradise Driver and The Wall in Wales it involves a contemplation of outside phenomena and the working
of a mind. The book also experiments with techniques new to us.
One aspect of the book consists of fourteen photographs of rich
colour and considerable beauty (inkjet printed on handmade paper
and tipped into the book) which look somewhat like canvases by
an abstract artist but were in fact found in very different circumstances.
The text element in this imposing and elegant book consists of
paragraphs from The Public School Latin Primer so well-remembered by schoolboys of a generation now becoming
somewhat antique. The reason why the Gender Rhymes and other wonders
from the Primer should receive such lavish and loving setting
are related and examined by Nicolas in his Preface. There he remembers
his twelve-year old self seeking to find out about life by studying
the Latins, a people who seemed to exist nowhere but within Canon
Kennedy's Latin Primer.
Bulmer type. Text paper is Hahnemuhle Bugra Butten.
The photographs are printed on paper handmade in the 1940s from
an unknown Mill.
The case binding has a leather spine and the boards are covered
with a patterned paper designed and printed by Nicolas McDowall.