Mr President; my lairds, leddies, and gentlemen; I ha’ been tould aff the year tae propose the memory o’ Scotia’s Bard, Oor Rabbie. This does no’ fricht me, for it isnae possible tae be wrang about Rabbie Burns.
Nae ither poet: no’ Shakespeare, nor Goethe in Germany, nor Racine or ony poet in France, nor ony o’ the American poets, is sae belovit as tae ha’, lang after his e’e was closit in death, sic celebrations, sic undying affection, as has Oor Rabbie: Burns Suppers on Burns’ Nichts a’ ower the world. The sun micht ha’ set on the British Empire; it’s no’ set and ne’er shall on Burns’ Nichts and a’ the wee mon’s influence.
Noo, why’s that? The American poet, Walt Whitman, proclaimit in a poem, as if he were himself his nation, that he was large and containit multitudes and a’ contradictions. Weel, that micht be; but gin he did, he was but striving after Rabbie Burns. Puir, suffering humanity – a mon’s a mon for a’ that – together make up ane family, Jock Tamson’s bairns, and in us are a’ the contradictory impulses o’ humankind. Rabbie Burns containit and reconcilit in himself a’ these contradictions at once. A farmer’s lad wi’ sufficient education to be a great poet; the poet o’ honest poverty and the puir wha took service as an exciseman; a lecher – though ne’er the drunkard some ha’ slanderit him as being – wha could ha’ gi’en points tae Boswell, and a romantic in the tradition o’ the mediæval poets o’ courtly love and o’ Dante himself. A mon wha castigatit the auld Jacobites By Name, and damnit the Act o’ Union, and saw his country as he thoucht betrayit, and then governit for their profit, by a parcel o’ rogues (awa’, Whigs, awa’!) – and wha celebratit, wi’ romantic nostalgia, the auld Royal Stewarts, and went for a sodger – a private sodger – in the sairvice o’ the House o’ Hanover. The poet wha sang – having first written – the songs o’ democratic solidarity wi’ the puir, and wha went for a sodger when the French Revolutionaries threatenit the Crown and Constitution as it was, in a time when naebody’d sae much as conceivit the idea o’ a Reform Act. E’en the kirk and the Unco’ Guid, wi’ oceans o’ whitewash, ha’ tried to claim him in some sort: nae easy task, when he’s the poet wha pennit ‘Nine Inch Will Please A Leddy’.
Rabbie Burns is the poet wha can be – and is – quotit aye and alike by Nat and Unionist, Tory and Corbynite twa corbies, and a’. He was – he is – the mon wha’s Jock Tamson’s truest bairn, in whom a’ contradictions meet and reconcile. In him is the hail clamjamfry o’ humanity but the saint. His life and his poetry and song are a great, firm, stout building, an edifice, plain and grand: and ye may mak’ kirk or mill o’ it. And that is why sae mony o’er twa centuries ha’ shelterit in him.
And that is why the sun ne’er sets on him and his legacy, which is wide as a’ the world. Mr President; my lairds, leddies, and gentlemen: charge your glasses and rise wi’ me; I gie ye a’, Th’ Immortal Memory o’ Rabbie Burns!
... preached by Canon Paddick SSC at SS Mary and Leonard Woolfont Abbas.
Christmas-Day
By Canon Paddick:
‘Rejoice! Rejoice!
‘“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God”: and this day has the Word come to be with us, clothed in our flesh, made man, to dwell in our midst. “In him was life; and the life was the light of men. And the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not. ...And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us, (and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father,) full of grace and truth”: glory and trumpets, how can we not rejoice?
‘We are made God’s children by adoption and grace, and daily renewed by the Holy Spirit, all through the merits and sacrifice of Christ Jesus, “his Son, whom he hath appointed heir of all things, by whom also he made the worlds; Who being the brightness of his glory, and the express image of his person, and upholding all things by the word of his power, when he had by himself purged our sins, sat down on the right hand of the Majesty on high”.
‘He did that for us. A people inclined to evil; careless and uncaring, casually cruel, selfish, venal, shabby, of whom the righteousness of the best of us is without God filthy rags. And for us, for our salvation, he is come amongst us to purge our sins, sponsor our adoption into the family of God, and clothe us in the shared brightness of his glory! Rejoice!
‘Here is Christ, born to be king, and not to escape to Skye, but to redeem us by sacrifice. This great Feast is at one with the other, that of Easter. There is so much Ordinary Time because he redeems us to a purpose, this side of eternity: that we, having been disciplined to discipleship in every Advent and every Lent, having observed vigil, fast, and feast, raise him up as he was raised upon the Cross, Creator, Infant, Redeemer, Risen Lord, Judge, and he being raised up shall draw all to himself and to the offer of salvation.
‘He has come to us, his utterly unworthy creatures and people, to dwell with us and save us. “And there were in the same country shepherds abiding in the field, keeping watch over their flock by night. And, lo, the angel of the Lord came upon them, and the glory of the Lord shone round about them: and they were sore afraid. And the angel said unto them, Fear not: for, behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people. For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour, which is Christ the Lord. And this shall be a sign unto you; Ye shall find the babe wrapped in swaddling clothes, lying in a manger.
‘“And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God, and saying,
‘“Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men”’: Rejoice!
‘Rejoice! With all who hear this great news, shepherds and angels, priests and prophetesses: Rejoice!’
People will judge your book by its cover – and its title page and first few paras: Part Ceithir
To catch you up: Parts One, Two, Three, and Three A.
Now. Book design beyond the cover.
‘There is as much difference to my eyes between the leaded bourgeois type of a Times article and the slovenly print of an evening halfpenny paper as there could be between your negro and your Esquimaux. The detection of types is one of the most elementary branches of knowledge to the special expert in crime, though I confess that once when I was very young I confused the Leeds Mercury with the Western Morning News. But a Times leader is entirely distinctive, and these words could have been taken from nothing else.’
– Mr Holmes, as retailed by Dr JH Watson in The Hound of the Baskervilles
I am in the hospital. It is my first experience with morphine. I am in the hospital, where everything, real and unreal (and surreal), is lived in the present continuous. I am in the hospital, and ill enough to justify it, and in more danger than I or they know (or will know), and, God help us all, I am hallucinating about page layout, typography, dingbats, and book design.
Writers. Good God.
– Mr Pyle in his heart attack memoir, Tonight at the Morpheum: A Hospital Farce in Three Acts
We have detailed in prior posts the importance of the right typeface on your cover, and of consistency. This applies equally to What Lurks Within. Your title page may reflect your cover; but if your cover is not in something that looks good and right and apt on the page as text, you really must use a different typeface for the body of the book. (Chapter heads may, often rather elegantly, mimic or mirror or complement the typeface on the cover, by contrast: literally by contrast to the text body, and, it oughtn’t to want saying, if and only if doing so does not clash with or take away from the look and feel of the text body typeface. (Mr Wemyss notes that he does not, in his private life, patronise takeaways which have The Clash on their sound systems. Some things are simply not Tafelmusik.))
We may as well say at once that the version of your work prepared and formatted for e-readers has its own constraints, purely technical and technological ones; and these ought to be followed. (A quite useful guide, really, taking it all in all, may be found here.) But this is not within our remit here.
We are discussing the physical book.
It is as well to choose a font, a typeface, with which you are satisfied to be associated for what is mysteriously called ‘the long haul’ (a Naval expression, I presume...). Once you have made any sort of name for yourself, and all the more if you are committing a series, these subliminal continuities matter immensely.
The typeface ought also to be one apposite to the genre, and capable of its requirements (writers of non-fiction engaged in popularising the sciences, for example, may have cause to include formulæ, and their typeface wants to give them that option; writers of thrillers set Overseas, who are up to their oxters in villains with Slavic or Latin American or Daesh-ly Arabic names, shall want diacritics to hand). The typeface really is better off in having ligatures: certainly the common digraphs such as ‘æ’ and ‘œ’, but also, if possible, ‘ff, fi, fl, ffi, ffl, ſt’ if anything historical crops up, and ‘st’. These add dignity: that ‘leaded bourgeois type’ air. (Historians particularly can make us of that subliminal effect.)
But all of this bows to legibility; with dignity very nearly joint first. Persons fancying themselves poets have an appallingly marked tendency to believe their books ought to be printed (full stop … but I go on) in markedly appalling ‘pretty-pretty’ typefaces which render their vapid effusions illegible as well as, in any case, unreadable. Real poets do not: the only Fancy Fonts you find in poets of the stature of Eliot, Auden, Larkin, and Betjeman, are Greek.
Similarly, nothing has ever been – nor shall ever be – taken seriously in certain fonts. If you publish in Comic Sans, you’re a fool. If, frankly, you publish in a sans-serif typeface at all, you’re a twat.
Accordingly, you are advised most urgently to choose a serif typeface of uncompromised legibility – even at smaller weights or points – and with some dignity to it. It wants to be overtly unobtrusive and subliminally suasive. Plain, stodgy Times New Roman and its derivatives work perfectly well, and are your best choice for the e-book version in any case. Subliminally, typefaces have a semiotic function (so much so that even Dan Sodding Brown, the William Topaz McGonagall of the railway station trade paperback, seems slightly less unreadable and unbelievable, and marginally more literate, than he should otherwise do or in fact is: and he’s a bugger who thinks semiotics are something called ‘symbology’. The world had been spared much trash had he and that ghastly cow who wrote the Twilight balls been forced to publish only in Impact or Westminster or Brush Script ... or Curlz MT).
We, by the way, have come to adopt and hew to one of the Garamond typefaces. All the same, you cannot go very far wrong with most serif fonts, even unto Caslons, Bells, Fells, or even Didones.
If you are considering your ‘badge or marque’ typeface, you ought also to consider it in context, on the page; and to remember that the paper of the page may be white, or cream. As you presumably have some sort of graphics programme for your covers, take a sample text and try it on a white background and on a cream, in various sizes of your possible typefaces.
Some of you shall have published online in the past, and accustomed yourself to the Web’s conventions (and bad habits). Eschew these. Three centred asterisks on a screen are one thing, to indicate a shift or break or some damned thing within a chapter; on the physical page, something like this is far superior:
A dingbat such as ❦ is better still.
As for such considerations as indents, paragraphing, the position of chapter heads or titles, and All That … we can tell you only, rather uselessly, to go by feel. That feel, however, wants to be informed by a fairly wide reading in and familiarity with your genre and sub-genre: if there are certain conventions common to it, it is for you to know them, and to be able either to follow them or to know when and why and how far to break them deliberately. The measure of this as of all things is the probably effect on the potential reader and purchaser: writing may be an art; selling it is a business. And – as you are presumably a reader yourself – you ought to have some idea of what other readers respond to or don’t, both consciously and otherwise, with all allowances made for connotations and overtones and subliminal effects.
That ought to get you started thinking, at least. If we think of anything further, we’ll revisit the topic.
People will judge your book by its cover: Part Three (A), on Mr Pyle’s insistence
To recap: parts Uno, Zwei, & Τρία in this series.
Back for a moment, then, to the matter of Cover Art. In Part Three, it is written,
As is evident from the Village Tales series covers, what we do is use royalty-free, commercial-use, no-attribution-required, freely modifiable images, and subject them to artistic modification. Nor does it want a programme costing hundred of quid to make those artistic modifications: GNU’s GIMP does perfectly well. Fiddle about with the filters until you’re happy....
Mr Pyle believes this to merit some exposition. Over to you, MSP.
MSP: All right. You’ve found your royalty-free, commercial-use, no-attribution-required, freely modifiable image. Now what in the Sam Hill do you do with the damn thing?
Well, as seen in Part Three, you can transform it into something painterly, if you’ve a mind to. You can increase edge weights, mask, sharpen, colorize, lighten, highlight, smear, blur, filter, and make a watercolor or an oil painting or a chalk pastel of it.
This fabric was originally wine-colored; I greened it into this
(which is on the back cover of Ordinary Time as a background); and you equally well can re-color, rotate, crop, distort, erode, and make hay with whatever source image you have to hand. You can impose the look of painting-on-canvas on it, or needlepoint, or whatever you like. You can paste things together, you can change the light and the light source – look at the Evensong cover’s central panel. You can make a mosaic of it if you care to. You can flip it through any degrees on the compass. You can float a translucent flag over the damn thing if you think it helps.
You can 3-D it if that makes you feel tingly, I don’t give a rat’s. It’s your book, and all that matters is that it look right for what you want to do in terms of attracting a buyer. It’s like fly-fishing: you tie your own and you match your particular hatch in your particular water.
And you can and sure as shooting ought to do something even to the great blank background (clothify, canvas, what have you), whether it’s to be matte or gloss on dead tree: it may as well have its own subtle interest. (In fact, trade paper publications cry out for having their backgrounds made to look, almost subliminally, like cloth. Gives a suggestion of tone and justifies the price.)
But here are a few strictures.
Don’t overdo the smears and blurs and oilification to the point it looks like a Civ 5 loading screen.
Work at high DPI resolutions, and 100% or higher as you work: when you have to scale the sumbitch down, you’ll see why, and the more so when you consider what it’ll look like as a thumbnail on the Interwebs. Keep track of lightness and contrast: you’d be surprised what a filter can unexpectedly do to those, and unless you’re working at high res and full size and checking it regularly in 18% or 12.5% view to see what may come of it when scaled, you’re right likely to be unpleasantly surprised.
Don’t be afraid to use digital snapshots of Great Works of Art from centuries past for which copyright has long since gone to dust, and to manip the hell out of them. But bear in mind that some museums – with, in my considered opinion as a (thankfully retired) lawyer, nothing but sheer, breathtaking gall to back them – assert an alleged copyright in the public domain artwork they happen to have their claws on. Tax-fattened hyenas.
And don’t be limited by whatever your particular grafix program can do. You can manipulate your source material in other ways, online, before you even start playing with it in your particular program: long shots into peaceful villages from a surrounding hillside, and (especially) steam trains (which, when dealing with Gerv, will come up sooner or later), are, for instance, right nigh crying out for a pseudo-tilt-shift before you begin farting around with colors and hues and light, say.....
And be aware, too, of the conventions in Western art, similar to those of the Western stage (who enters stage right, who, stage left). When (for example) cropping to avoid a mere centering, bear in mind that one direction (no, not that one, God damn it. I leave singing – for a certain value of singing – epheboi to Gerv) connotes, subliminally, motion towards the past, and the other, motion To The Future, Duck Dodgers and Space Cadet Porky! Observe:
Finally, important as it is to choose your font, your typeface, for the cover, it’s equally important to remember that it can be in color, you know, and the color ought to complement or contrast happily with the rest of the damn cover and its art.
That’ll get you started. Gervie?
GMWW: Quite. Ah … thank you. Yes. Where were we? Oh, yes, of course. We move on to the pages within, and I repeat my promise, that,
Next time, we’ll go inside the book and talk design, layout, and typography....
People will judge your book by its cover: ain’t no party like a partie trois.
Right. Covers. Then author’s photos, design, and the like.
Remember what we said. This is all part of your marque, your badge, your visual representation of yourself and your work to the world.
Before a potential reader picks up your Utter Legend of a Masterpiece and is Swept Away Enraptured by Your Deathless Prose, she must decide to bother with picking the damned thing up. It is your job to seduce her into doing so.
How?
By what she can see of the volume on the shop shelf or in the online listing.
Your book may or mayn’t have, in the strict sense, a colophon; but it wants a colophon in the looser sense, a logo associated with your imprint, if not on the cover, at the very least on the title page. Ours comes in several styles, fitted and modifiably fitted to the particular task:
Fiction or non-fiction, series or no, a certain uniformity of layout is desirable. Our preceding post showed the first five covers in the Village Tales series; here, now, is the template for the biography series:
As we have stressed, typefaces, fonts, matter. The series slug may be in one; the title, in another; the imprint name in a third, which should be, save in very rare cases, and always inwith a series, uniform. Note that the Village Tales series covers, George’s ghost stories, and the Bapton’s Brief Lives series all use the same Roman part-serif font for ‘Bapton Books’.
The font used – everywhere on the cover and title page, even where fonts are mixed – really ought to be dignified and genre-appropriate. One cannot imagine any work which should sell if its cover were in Comic Sans. A Western, say, may well and properly take a poster-style or ‘Western’ font, as here;
but in the grotesquely unlikely event we were ever to publish a ‘romance’ ‘novel’ as that term is commonly used, no power in Heaven, in Hell, or upon earth should make us employ some tweely-grandiose font embossed in mock-gilt or some sodding thing. It’s simply not on. (Which having been said, it may be that that is what the market expects of the genre and requires of the cover: which is one reason it should be a grotesquely unlikely event were we ever to publish a ‘romance’ ‘novel’ in the sense commonly associated with that term.)
But of course, most book covers want something more than merely text on ’em. As is evident from the Village Tales series covers, what we do is use royalty-free, commercial-use, no-attribution-required, freely modifiable images, and subject them to artistic modification. Nor does it want a programme costing hundred of quid to make those artistic modifications: GNU’s GIMP does perfectly well. Fiddle about with the filters until you’re happy: you can readily transform a Perfectly Sound Snap into something rather luscious, as in this enhancement of the Brendon Hills in Somerset.
Readily available sources of note include
stocksnap.io
pexels.com
unsplash.com
gratisography.com
freestocks.org
nos.twnsnd.co (New Old Stock)
pixabay.com
and
morguefile.com (don’t panic, the name is journalistic).
Do be aware that even here, unless one can verify that the photographer uploading the image did his diligence, one is well-advised to eschew snaps with people in them, as model releases are all too often overlooked and wanting. And always check the permissions for each image, no matter the overall policy of the site.
Finally, for now, there is, if you have so far seduced your potential buyer, the author’s photo, commonly on the back cover. For reasons not altogether clear, people seem to wish to know what the author looks like: even so resolutely pseudonymous an author as is Mr Wemyss. (This is no cause for alarm, as, even should Mr Wemyss awake tomorrow as famous as Dickens or Conan Doyle, it should hardly cause him to be recognised in public: every seventh Briton of his sex, circumstances, and ethnicity looks a good deal like him … poor sods.) You may see the sort of thing we mean here (back cover image), as to Mr Wemyss … and how to modify these, as well, artistically, here and here.
Do bear in mind that you shall age. And there shall come a point at which you really cannot go on using the ‘head-shot’ of a decade prior. Embrace it. Readers who are looking for your work have aged with you in many a case. And don’t be vain. The truly great Peter Ackroyd, for example, looks, on the cover (trade paper) and dust jacket flap (hardcover) of Thames like a jolly, rubicund, rather plump, sporting publican who may have overdone the ‘and one of whatever you’re having, landlord’ (or, if you like, like Mr Pyle), and, on the cover / dust jacket of Albion, like a regimental colonel the barest bones of whose gallantry citations in the Gazette have inspired a screenplay. It hardly matters. And we ourselves struggle on, looking like this:
So put aside vanity and false modesty alike and forge this connexion with your potential readers as well. And if you really are unbearably plain, well, as we’ve noted, there are apps and filters for that, short of having a portrait painter in....
Next time, we’ll go inside the book and talk design, layout, and typography....
People will judge your book by its cover: II pars.
Let’s go on talking covers, shall we?
They’re your last chance to make a first impr- – oh, you know the drill. They are also, speaking practically, your badge, your marque in visual form.
For example, in the good and spacious days of yore, you could spot a Penguin from across the pitch, as shown here.
That was and is important – and we’ll come back to that point.
It is especially important if you are writing fiction that your covers be – in addition to all else – recognisable. Not only as genre; but also as yours.
What do we mean by a cover which is recognisable by genre? Well.... I think it was Harlan Ellison who said that if there is an attractive woman on the cover wearing a mail bikini and wielding what’s effectively a light-sabre, it’s SF. ‘Romance’ ‘novels’ (we despise the genre, as you may possibly have guessed) tend to show epicene-but-gym-muscled pretty-boys and improbably bouffant women, swooning, in a mid-20th-C commercial art style, or, nowadays, lovers groomed beyond all likelihood for the time and place and circumstances of the tale, shot, photographically, through enough gauze and Vaseline (ahem) to make Margaret Beckett look like Marilyn Monroe. Pretentious balls ‘Literary’ fiction and Booker bait and all that utter balls … MSP?
MSP: You’re looking for Justice Potter Stewart’s line in Jacobellis, about obscenity: you know it when you see it. Hipster-inflected design, or clever-clever middlebrow ‘cultured’ references aping high culture, all that happy horseshit.
GMWW: Yes. Precisely. In any event, if you are by intention the next Jane Austen, your cover oughtn’t, perhaps, to look like something on a pulp paper of a Mickey Spillane.
Note that I said, ‘of a Mickey Spillane’. This gets us to the next point: covers recognisable as yours. This is of course why Penguin made certain its books were distinctly recognisable at a distance; and if you are writing a series, you’re a fool if you don’t do likewise. I believe it was Inspector Grant, in Tey’s The Daughter of Time, who reflected that book-buyers tend not to want or seek out, say, a Bildungsroman with such-and-such a setting and a hero of 5.79 on the Byronic Twat scale, but the newest Insert Author Name Here or the latest Insert Character Name Here. (The observation builds upon a bitter one in Gissing’s The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft, if I recall....) And it’s quite true, now as then. Consule Tey, readers expected ‘this year’s Dr Thorndyke novel’ or ‘the annual Christie for Christmas’; so do they now, for the latest Rowling-Pterry-Hunger-Games-What-Have-You.
You may not at all care for that brute fact. Well, facts don’t give a toss for your feelings, either. So pick a – MSP, what am I searching after, here?
MSP: ‘Trade dress’ is what it’s called in US law. It’s what tells you, at 75 mph on I-10 West, that that’s a McDonald’s or a KFC or (in the dear dead days beyond recall) a Howard Johnson’s.
GMWW: That’s it. Thank you. Pick a format and stick with it. Here, for example, are the covers to date, including the forthcoming volume, in the Village Tales series.
As some kind fan noted at TV Tropes, in the entry, ‘Idiosyncratic Cover Art’,
cloth-look cover in an ecclesiastical color; rose-and-thistle cipher to one side of a line, six lions passant guardant to the other; central panel, approximately one-third of the cover, which doesn’t spoil, doesn’t lie, and consists of oblique, artistic, inanimate references, often heraldic or churchly, to characters, plot points, or themes; and a typeface – Roman, part-serif, and lapidary – very much akin to that used on the Cenotaph and other UK public buildings and monuments. In fact, in Evensong, which was published in two volumes and in one door-stopper omnibus edition, the three covers are distinguished only by a banner stating which volume it is … in the same typeface, over a background of silk cloth in one of the colors of the Church year. That one in its format could almost be mistaken for the Church of England prayer-book at a distance. Which is sort of the point....
True enough, by and large; but the devil is in the details.
Cross and Poppy, for example, has a few differences to the other covers. There are but three lions passant guardant, for one thing, but that change was purely artistic. More pertinently, as the first book, the title, and the subtitle / tag-line naming the series, is at the head; the author’s name at the bottom. This is reversed for subsequent covers. Why?
MSP: Because you are a sneaky, conniving son of a bitch.
GMWW: Says the man with the major responsibility for covers.... But it is here that we let you in on a little secret. Note the deliberate evolution: Cross and Poppy: a Village Tale to Evensong (‘the well-loved series continues’) to ‘Village Tales / The Beloved Series Continues’.... Now note that, from Evensong onwards, the authorial name takes pride of place, and then the series name.
Remember what we noted above. Readers look for ‘the new Wemyss’ or ‘the latest Village Tale’. And when the author gets top of the bill over the series (or vice-versa), and that over the volume title … this is the traditional, conventional signal, in trad publishing, that the Author Is A Big Name and The Series Is A Big Deal. Use this trope.
Now, let’s look at some mock-ups of forthcoming volumes, and attend to the subtle differences. A Domestic Interior is to take us away from the Woolfonts, to Luineag, Castle Camserney, and old Rory Badenoch’s mouldering castle in the Highlands.
Note that the six lions passant guardant have been replaced by a lion rampant. Ahem.
A Fêted End focusses, not on Charles Taunton and our old friends, but on Kit Trowbridge and his family and people. Do you see both the continuity and the subtle distinctions?
And then there’s this.
Note that the front cover has a different ‘dress’ in that the rose-and-thistle and the six lions are replaced by the Taunton crest and the Stuart badge with a baton of bastardy; and that the book is credited to Millicent and Charles. The back cover, however, discloses the truth and the jest.
Now do go back and look again, pray, at the series covers to date, including the forthcoming Ordinary Time. Note that the ‘oblique, artistic, inanimate references, often heraldic or churchly, to characters, plot points, or themes’ vary slightly: C&P and The Day suggest that the focus is on the countryside and mostly secular events; Evensong is determinedly ecclesiastical; Ye Little Lambs conveys both messages, and notes its concentration on the Downlands parishes; and Ordinary Time is rather ecclesiastical in design but has added the symbol of a sheep for the Downs.
In our next post, we’ll delve into the process of creating these covers, and whence we took the source-images … and whence you may do the same.
Wodewough Wood was not, to the eye of the forester, one wood, but several: a Trinitarian wood, an Anglican wood of unity in diversity and diversity in unity....
It had escaped the plague of conifer plantation. Withdrawn though it might be into its smaller compass, its newer borders, separated from its ancient fraternal woods now lost or diminished as it had not been diminished, it yet remained itself, adapted to its ground, ancient woodland in an ancient landscape.
Upon its fringes, where clay overlay the gently sloping chalk, it was broadleaved ancient woodland: ash and hazel, hornbeam and hawthorn, sallow, field-maple, and privet, downy birch and aspen; pedunculate oak, hornbeam, and ash raised aloft their standards, and in Springtide many a glade was fair with bluebells and fenced with bramble and bracken. Elsewhere, on steeper slopes and chalkier soils and grit, the trees rang changes upon the method, dodging here and hunting there; and some of the old ashes and hornbeams on the hems of the wood had long been coppiced. Even there, the wood displayed, to them that had eyes to see, its patents of ancientry: thin-spiked hedge and moschatel, Forster’s wood-rush, broad-leaved hellebore, orchid, all amidst primrose, bugle, and dog violet, Guelder rose and dog’s-mercury, the standards varying with the wetness of the soil, the influence of Wade’s Pool of old: ash and maple here, oak and ash there, with their proper understory and just, proportionate ground-flora. Nearest Wadpool and the wetter ground, on gentle slopes slowly draining and almost plashy in places, wet ash–maple series flourished, priceless with small-leaved lime, field-maple gilding each Autumn against the rubescence of wild service tree, above woodruff, sanicle, orpine, and spurge. Sweet chestnut and honeysuckle marked areas in which the soil was lightly acidified by the slow percolation of waters creeping towards the pool from the alkaline chalklands, slowly bearing with them the organic decay of small life to do what peat did elsewhere.
Deeper into the wood, on the true high chalk downland, oak stood proudly, with ash and whitebeam in support, uplifted over holly and spindle, blackthorn and hawthorn, bellflower, orchid and fern.
So and thus to the unsuspected penetralia, the sanctum sanctorum, the secret, quiet heart of the wood, set surprisingly upon gentler slopes and billows of the Downs than was common for its particular trees: broad, clean-floored, expansive, lightsome: the great and ancient yews, girthed like giants, ancient of days, sempiternal in geologic time.
Such was Wodewough Wood, where finch and fieldfare in their seasons rejoiced and dormouse and shy deer slept at ease, guarded for centuries by baron and duke as a wild park and a larder, and an ornament. It was the jewel of the Downlands, the Platonic ideal of a South-Western forest upon the chalk, with a great yew wood at its hidden heart.
And its setting was equal to it: the Downlands, untouched, unsullied, unspotted from the world of plough and settlement, rich with butterfly and herb, bird and flower, acres of rich pasturage upon the staunch familiar chalk. Chalk milkwort and betony, gentians and sedges, adorned a wide empire of sheep’s-fescue and meadow oat-grass, cowslip, scabious, and salad-burnet, wild carrot and kidney vetch, saw-wort, red fescue, and orchid. Lapwing and partridge, corn bunting, skylark, and nightingale, sang and soared amidst the patient, incurious flocks; yaffle and greater-spotted woodpecker haunted wood and copse; and kestrel and hobby, tawny owl, little owl, and buzzard preyed upon them all, as upon such field mice, shrews, and voles, under tree and under open sky, as escaped the woods’ stoats and weasels.
Like the old Malet honour it bejewelled, it had been preserved as a living, saving remnant of what had been.
