Call of the Windswept Downs
A Poem
By E.M.Owen (1934)
Illustrations by R.A.Wilson (2010)
This is the first hand-set metal-type work for letterpress which we have attempted using our Adana 8x5 press. The subject is a poem, which will eventually form an edited illustrated volume of works selected from a large number, which have recently come to light in the effects of the classicist, Ellen Mary Owen. Written in 1934, The Call of the Windswept Downs is the the first poem of very many, which are included in a set of MSS, hand-written in the red school exercise books of the period. For much of her life, Ellen Owen taught Greek and Latin at the Tudor Hall School in Oxfordshire. These poems pre-date this period in their writing, but from the notes which accompany them, they were obviously worked-up to a finished standard during a later period, probably during the 1950s and 1960s. The subjects are mainly the natural world surrounding Ellen in her youth on the South Downs where she grew up with her mother after her father died with his regiment on the NW Frontier in 1919, and from where she was "returned" to an England she had never seen. The poetry is a beautiful recollection of that time, just before Hitler's War, when everything seemed all the more wonderful for the knowledge that it must soon all come to an end. All of the poems immediately pre-date the 1939 onset of hostilities, but it is clear that like the tone of Hardy's novels, this is an attempt to preserve what soon will be lost.
In this, the first setting we have attempted, we are using 12pt Garamond for the body of the text, and an unidentified larger text which we have sorted out from a mixed bag which was donated to us recently by the widely acknowledged maestro of vintage Land Rover restoration, Jon Randall. Not to be confused with John Randle of the Whittington Press who would be the more likely man to donate lead type. Not so, in this instance however. Above the body of the poem is a hand-printed lino-cut image of a wind-swept down from a sketch which I whipped up one morning on St. Martin's Plain on the Isles of Scilly. The whole is printed on a Zerkall paper using water-based printers inks in a navy blue, then simply hand-bound in a soft cover.
It is my intention to select approximately twelve poems from the MSS, and to produce a slim volume with five small illustrations of the sort represented above, with two full page illustrations and a hard case binding.
It is my intention to select approximately twelve poems from the MSS, and to produce a slim volume with five small illustrations of the sort represented above, with two full page illustrations and a hard case binding.
