St James Park Press

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St James Park Press

Publishing hand-made illustrated letterpress books

12/06/2025

Sketching out designs and possibilities to lead up to the final print and then seeing it as a print is a fantastic and satisfying process. And yet it always comes as a surprise when it happens.

10/06/2025

It’s very lucky that as a result of past acquisitions from fellow presses, I can replicate important aspects of Byrne’s Euclid with hand-set metal type and ornaments; my foundry Caslon type from the Fleece Press, my Caslon black-letter equivalent from the Old School Press, and the (monotype) ornaments copied from Caslon’s Border No. 62 from the Evergreen Press. What are the odds!

06/06/2025

Adding the blue layer, to highlight in Byrne’s Euclid both: the swash letters used alongside their italic counterparts (in later iterations further swash letters were added to Caslon’s Old Face); as well as the roman long s.

05/06/2025

Continuing the exploration of Caslon’s Old Face in Byrne’s Euclid, alongside the normal roman (as in the T here), the Chiswick Press printed using the wonderful long s, here in italic. Sweepingly winsome.

04/06/2025

Although Byrne’s Euclid was set in Caslon’s Old Face, the compositors at the Chiswick Press (who printed the edition) had quite the field day when setting the text, using no less than 5 versions of the upper case letter Q, including one that looks like it was borrowed from a Baskerville cabinet. Here the long tailed Caslon Q in black is printed alongside a couple of those variations, in blue.

03/06/2025

Caslon’s Old Face is the type used for Byrne’s 1847 edition of Euclid’s Elements (or to be more precise, the edition published from the Chiswick Press). Although Caslon is not everyone’s cup of tea, there is no denying that this long tailed Q - printed in enlarged fashion - is rather bonny.

30/05/2025

Adding a full alphabet of Mary Byfield initials around the larger coloured A. Byrne did not actually need to use every letter of the alphabet for his Euclid edition, so it’s nice to have the full complement here.

29/05/2025

Adding the colour red underneath Mary Byfield’s letter. This wasn’t done in the original edition, but it helps to highlight the letterform itself, as opposed to the ornamentation around it.

28/05/2025

Mary Byfield was an illustrator during the first half of the Nineteenth Century. Alongside all manner of engravings for various works, she cut the initials for the Chiswick Press that adorn Byrne’s Euclid. This letter is printed as an enlarged version of the smaller initials cut for Byrne’s edition.

27/05/2025

The final red addition to complete the title page print run… this image has become synonymous with Byrne’s Euclid, used not only for the title page, but also on the cover of the original binding, as well as within the book itself.

23/05/2025

The layers of colour for the title-page continuing to grow… this time a blue colour run.

22/05/2025

Printing the yellow colour run for the recreated title-page required some reading up of William Savage’s ‘Practical Hints on Decorative Printing’ (from 1822) to look at mixing the right shade of yellow.

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