The Art of Nicholas and Mary Parry
(The Tern Press)
Comments by Nicholas Parry from ‘Portraits of Presses’
printed and published by The Whittington Press, 1997.
I had always known that art was the only way for me, but one of the events which pushed me towards books occurred in 1947 or 48. I had been ill and having missed the first couple of weeks of term, my father was escorting me back to school in north Germany. We were having to wait a few hours in Hamburg for a change of train. Strolling through the late, dark evening ruins of the empty city, I was captivated by the sight of a dimly lit window. The owner was showing for sale his wonderful butterfly collection and fine books. One of the latter contained coloured prints of North American Indians. The cream paper, prints, typography and lovely binding all made a deep impression and they remain vividly in my memory.
It seemed quite natural that from then on paintings and drawings should occupy books; that nature diaries should be illustrated, music should be bound and that even paperbacks could be re-covered with better designs. My first complete books were hand-written texts, often of early British subjects, perhaps reacting to The Lord of the Rings, and illustrated with watercolour paintings. One or two are still in existence, but the most ambitious, The Mabinogion, was broken up and sold as individual sheets.
Ninety percent of the work undertaken at the Tern Press is the production of books. Occasionally we print, design, illustrate or bind for other people. Usually this type of work is jobbing printing, letterheadings, cards or posters, for friends. From time to time, major commissions come along. A few years ago I was asked to paint seven eight-foot-high canvases and I am currently preparing to carve a life-size statue in Spanish chestnut for Market Drayton town centre.
The book work has been shared equally between us over the years, swapping roles as typesetters, binders and illustrators. Today, mine is chiefly illustrating and printing. Mary’s is binding, collating, accounts and parcelling. We share the choice of subjects, often mulling over for years ideas that need to be formed into our own style of work. Typesetting is once again shared.
During the ’60s any typography or printing I needed had been done on an old Wharfdale Bremner press belonging to a jobbing printer in town. In the early ’70s though, I won first prize for a painting in a Welsh Arts Council competition. Once again the subject was The Mabinogion. With the prize money, I was able to buy the Bremner form Mr. Meadon, my old printing friend who was then on the point of retiring. At first I had planned to use it primarily for larger prints. For this it was quite adequate, but as we became more involved in the use of words and type, then its very worn oak runners, dented bed and broken grippers became more obvious. At first we were able to patch it up and keep going, printing around twenty of our earlier titles on it. Some were illustrated with intaglio etchings and for these we have a small Kendall star-wheel press. In many ways our next installation has proved the most useful: the Arab platen. We have printed most of our books on it, including our two largest editions, Beowulf and A Shropshire Lad, both over 100 pages and on damped paper. As it is treadle operated, my knees have suffered since. It is hard work to use and people tell us that a parallel approach gives finer results, but I enjoy the enormous amount of control over pressure, and the opportunity to pause, linger on the impression or speed up at will.
Eventually we replaced the Bremner with a large Soldan flat bed proofing press. It is used for occasional posters, end or face papers and of course our larger books, John Clare’s Birds Nesting, and Trees. I have used it for one or two small books, printing several pages at once, but prefer to use each press for the work best suited to it, and for me the enjoyment of the Soldan lies in its leisurely pace and accurate registration. Some of the sheets in Birds Nesting went through the press over twenty times.
If this approach is thought to be too broad, I must stress that the essence of our work is communication and that this is primarily sought through the word, in our case both printed and written. I think that the most important thing is the power and conviction of this communication. The selection of the appropriate typeface has always therefore been most important to use and this has led us over the years to building up a collection of around 300 faces. Perhaps the most often used has been Delphin which we got from Stempel. It was designed by Georg Trump, with a simple dignified cap and an extremely useful lower case, which is essentially calligraphic in style but has variations of certain letters, making it ideal for several of our subjects.
For general small text work we now use our most recent addition, an Autovic, the only press with power, but slowed down for hand-feeding. We still need one or two parts for it. At the moment its position is unfortunate, as it is placed in the most south-easterly corner of the workshop, close to, almost surrounded by, glass windows. Not only does the ink dry out far too quickly, the rollers become soft and drive belt stretches, but the variability of light makes it impossible to judge the accuracy of inking from day to day. So one of our next jobs is to rearrange the windows and install a blind.
About five years ago we installed the Ludlow typecasting machine. We find it the perfect way for us to produce text. It is a fairly simple machine to use and to maintain. The mats and spacing are set by hand, out of a tray and into a composing stick, in a similar way as one would hand-set type. The advantages of the Ludlow are, once you have become adept at spelling backwards, that you can proof-read at about three stages, the right way around, as you go along; you can pick the mats up into whole words very quickly, you can cast lines as long as you wish in sizes from 6 to 84-point, and you can cast each line as many times as you like. We find it very fast and productive to work on two separate projects at a time, Mary setting from one case and I from another. It takes about three seconds for each cast. It is a wonderful craft in its own right.
We had not had the machine long, before an old recurring desire of mine was awakened. This is to design our own typeface. To make a set of mats for the Ludlow would be the simplest method. A few years ago in Rome, whilst studying inscriptions, I had remembered the Hadrian inscription at Uriconeum, the Roman city built at the point where the river Tern joins the Severn. I had made copies and taken rubbings from it many years ago as a student. The difficulties involved in transferring the effects of a set of graven images is considerable. The inscription has a sublime sense of space and the movement which shifts constantly as the light changes on the angle and depth of cut when seen from different positions. All this is lost when transferred to mere outline or shape. My initial idea was simply to design a set of caps, but as there are several versions of most of the characters and none at all of others, this has proved interesting.
We have always tried to make the binding an integral part of the subject matter of the book, reflecting its text, typography, mood and illustration. So, quite early on we acquired a name for using unusual materials. This may in fact have resulted from Mary’s early training as a dress designer. She has always been intensely fond of unusual fabrics and interested in the history of textiles, having worked in the Whitworth Art Gallery as the art student, where a most wonderful collection of textiles is housed. Mary is a self-taught binder, and although she has tried a few short book-binding courses, has never found that any of the problems that she has have been solved by this kind of experience.
Obviously, as Mary and I had met at art school studying lithography, illustration does play a very important role in our work. If we had been able to plan our course from the beginning, we should certainly have set up in lithography, a medium we both love and I myself find suitable for my rather free painterly style. But it did not happen that way. The techniques and methods we use we learned as we went along, having our route dictated by the circumstances in which we found ourselves. Wood-engraving I tried for the first time to illustrate our sixth book, Llywarch Hen. It contained about forty blocks, and by the time we printed Saint Mark’s Gospel, I felt reasonably competent. We used etching for a few books and probably will again, but generally speaking I feel that illustration is one area of the book that should not seek to impose its on nature onto the subject in any way. In this respect, I do not see myself, in our books at least, as an illustrator but as an artist, or as a composer setting words to music. I therefore usually adopt a stance of building up in my mind a balance between the typeface, colour and texture of the paper, with images in my mind conjured up from the subject. This leads to prints that are as simple as we can make them. Put simply, most surfaces can be printed from and can be eaten or cut into in one way or another: water, fire, acid, spirit, knives, hammers, sandpapers, drills. Each has its own nature. The basic principles of stopping out, negatives, positives, remain and the issue is how they may be used.
Nicholas Parry: two tributes
Frances McDowall
Nicholas Parry was well known to the book world on both sides of the Atlantic, where the output of the Tern Press has been admired and collected over many years. Even at the last Fine Press Book Fair in Oxford in November 2011, though obviously unwell, he was enjoying the company of printers from all over the world, all of whom recognised the very special character of his work, with that of his wife Mary, in the creation of their books. Over many years they had gone from selling books from their famous tandem bicycle to tours of the United States and exhibitions of their work in prestigious dealers' shops and galleries.
Nicholas met Mary at art school, where they both studied painting and printmaking, and especially stone lithography. At first he painted and exhibited widely, while also working as a designer and film animator. He and Mary bought a press when Nicholas won a Welsh Arts Council painting competition, and in 1973 they created the Tern Press together. It was named after the river near their home in Market Drayton on the border between England and Wales.
They explored many of the techniques of printmaking to accompany a wide variety texts. They shared a passion for words, and their list of titles reads like an essential guide to English, indeed world, literature, spanning many centuries. Nicholas is widely quoted as saying that 'our initial aims were to relate each subject to a relative set of materials, to think of the book as an overall work of art, rather like an opera, with a body (stage - props - paper - binding), intellect (thoughts - words - libretto), and feelings (music - colour - prints), to try, as in all art, to produce a form that lives and breathes. Thus our books are not conceived, designed, produced through process, but are perceived, arranged and produced through craft.'
Imagery was important to all their books, and there are many examples of wood or linocut, stone lithography and etching, and the choice of typefaces and their design became important too. A Ludlow typecaster was used for producing their texts, and they would work on this together. They created a typeface derived from a Roman inscription from the time of the emperor Hadrian that had been found near the Press, where the river Tern joins the Severn. Even as a student Nick had taken copies and rubbings from it and had admired 'the sublime sense of space and movement which shifts constantly as the light changes'. A study of music for the lute also became a source for his own scripts used in some hand-written special books. Thus the publications of the Tern Press demonstrate a complete and integrated approach to all the component parts of the making of a book.
Nick was a passionate believer in communicating our literary heritage in the most beautiful way he could envisage, and his talents were not confined to the printed and illustrated page. He was a painter, and many of his books are also original paintings. Latterly, lithography directly from the stone was his most favoured technique and there are some books where he uses three colours; some are handcoloured within the lithographed drawing, all with great delicacy. Nick often spoke of the inspiration of colour and subject matter he continued to find in the Shropshire landscape. Indeed, he painted 22 frescoes for the Festival Drayton Centre which encompassed views of local streets, canals, bridges (especially one by Telford) and the surrounding landscape.
He was a musician who loved early music, and was an accomplished performer on the lute as well as a lively banjo player in a jazz band. Many of the books relate to musical subjects and there were drawings of musicians at a jazz festival they visited in France.
It is difficult not to write about Mary here because together they were the Tern Press and her skills were of equal importance to all they produced -- and especially her bindings. So while celebrating the life of the partner who has died, we must also express our good wishes to Mary and their family, always of central importance to them, and hope that they will continue in their love of producing books.
Alan May
I first met Nick Parry at the Lute Society Summer School at Cheltenham, in 1972 or 1973. I was a newcomer both as a player and as an instrument builder, but he had attended previous schools. We discovered that we lived only a few miles from each other and that we had other interests besides early music in common. Both of us were working in art schools teaching printing and printmaking. But I was in need of lute lessons and Nick wanted a new tenor lute, so we agreed an arrangement whereby we made alternate fortnightly visits to each other's house to play together, and at the same time I started on building his lute. The arrangement worked well, although I think I had the best of the deal, as Nick introduced me to a whole wealth of lute music of which I had previously had no knowledge. I am thinking in particular about the wonderful range of duet music that he showed me, as well as the hauntingly beautiful vihuela music of Luis de Milan and Luis de Narviez.
Nick's interest in lute music extended to the baroque, but the eight-course lute that I had built for him had insufficient range, and in 1975 he asked me to build him a baroque lute based upon a painting in the Alte Pinakothek at Munich of 'Lady tuning a lute' by Hendryck van der Neer. He subsequently had the neck of this instrument modified and I heard him play the Bach Chaconne on it just a few weeks before he died.
In 1989 I joined the staff of the Department of Typography and Visual Communication at the University of Reading. A feature of the course there was that all students were expected to take part in intensive taught study courses during the Easter vacations in their second and final years. These included visits to northern Europe where the focus was on type design, and to Rome and Florence where inscriptional lettering was studied. In 1991 it was the turn of Rome and Florence, and the Parrys and Mays had a memorable ten days.
Nick and Mary's interest in making and printing books led them eventually to look at the possibilities of casting their own type. In the early 1990s I located a Ludlow typecasting machine in Reading which Nick decided to buy. I am not sure now whether my find did them a good turn, though, as transporting and installing such a heavy machine in the cellar at St Mary's Cottage proved to be not without incident.
Nick's enthusiasm and determination to pursue his visual and musical talents come what may was an inspiration to all of us. He is greatly missed.
Nicholas ]ohn Pariy, artist and printer,
born 2 March 1937, died 13 March 2012.
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