Here's an extract from the introduction to the Public House book:
This book features images of Lewes’s pubs, each one originally a handmade print by one of the Paddock Printmakers. The group meet at the Paddock Studios in Lewes, with tutor Carolyn Trant, to work and experiment with wood and lino cuts, wood engravings, collagraphs, monoprints, acetate engravings, and many variations and combinations of those techniques. The prints were produced during 2007.
This book is published in a limited run of fifty-four.
Public House is the third book produced by the group, celebrating local distinctiveness. The first two, produced in 2004 and 2005, showed prints of shops in the High Street, and Cliffe High Street. Already many of these premises have changed hands or use, so these books are documents about how things looked in a particular year.
Pubs change more slowly but we have included details of some now gone to show how the town has evolved, a subject of ever-increasing interest as the volume of building development continues to grow.
The text for this book draws on previous local history works. We are indebted to Bill Young and Bob Cairns’ Lewes Then and Now, Colin Brent’s Guide to the Town of Lewes, conversations with local historian John Bleach, and particularly Leslie Davey’s study The Inns of Lewes - past and present, revised in 2003 by Andrew Whitnall. You are encouraged to seek out this fascinating guide, republished by the Friends of Lewes and available from local outlets.
Text by Paddock Printmakers.
Hand-bound by Rachel Ward-Sale at Bookbinders of Lewes.
Layout design and print coordination by Peter Flanagan.
To purchase individual original prints and for other enquiries, email pprints.f@ukonline.co.uk
Above are some pages from the limited edition Public House book. The book is beautifully handbound, and measures 10x13 inches. All of the original prints in the book are in the exhibition at the Hibbert Room in Lewes (details below), and they vary in size from 6x8 inches to 20x9 inches.
