www.alisoneldred.com    alisoneldred@gmail.com    07712 592 155

Newsletter sign up

Newsletter August 2024

Shakespeare's Complete Plays, and The Globe Theatre

We now have the large prints of Neil Packer's images and they are spectacular. This (below) is the complete collection so shows 38 drawings. Neil says: 'I had intended for them to look like woodcuts and to perhaps carry some of that slightly unsettling nature from Shakespeare's period. They are however not woodcuts but worked in very fine pencil on tracing paper.'

Just refining everything into red and black, they look almost contemporary and at the same time very stylish. We'll have an edition of 50 prints, signed and numbered by Neil.
As you'll know, The Folio Society don't do anything by halves, so on the inside of the slipcase for their limited edition of the Complete Plays, Neil produced a separate image which shows the inside of the Globe Theatre. It is magic. This is a detail. More on the complete project here.
Here is the full image alongside some of the individual prints from the plays. Click on the image below to see it in more detail on the website. Or click here to see the whole collection,
We are so grateful to The Folio Society who have allowed us to offer prints from these images. Such was the appetite for the book that their limited edition sold out within weeks. We're hoping that a 'core' edition will follow at some point later this year.

John Harris, and something you may not know


This month, The Sunday Times announced the Top 100 Bestsellers of the Past 50 Years. I was delighted to see that among those books there were two with John Harris's covers. You may know him for his science fiction but for about twenty years he doubled as an illustrator of general fiction and that included travel books. These two covers were No. 13 and 38.
The author bought both of the paintings but John also produced covers for Wilbur Smith, Dervla Murphy, Michelle Paver and countless others. The body of work he produced during those years is still important and I'm quite sure that John's work played a part in attracting buyers to the books. We still have a few paintings left but they are quietly disappearing.
As you see, he's almost as happy on the shores of Cape Cod as he is in outer space. In fact some of his private commissions have that same mood as the SF images. We make prints of this one.
However, partly due to the interest around the SF Worldcon this month, we have very few of the SF sketches left. But we do have one cracker of a painting, Outside the Yards.

Chinese editions


Chinese readers might be interested to hear that John's most recent book, The Art of John Harris: Into the Blue, will soon be published in Chinese. And so will The Art of Ian Miller.

And finally . . .


With my other hat on, I'm involved with artists and writers of children's books. If anyone's feeling a bit baffled by AI at the moment, they might enjoy this book by Neal Layton. One of the things we have to be aware of with children's books is that subjects like climate change, AI and biodiversity can make children anxious. So with that in mind, you'll be pleased to hear that Neal explains AI quite gently, and reassures us that we each already have something quite clever, which is a brain. So let's stick with that for now.
Facebook
Instagram
Website