In Thornbury the other Saturday I picked out ‘Round Midnight (1961) by Dakota Staton from a charity shop record bin. It’s the sort of album that, a decade ago, one could have bought for less than a pound; the British Heart Foundation got a fiver out of me for this copy. I ought to have taken a closer look at the vinyl before purchasing: in record collecting parlance one could say the disc was in fair to good condition, which is to say it was quite badly scratched and otherwise distressed – so I definitely overpaid. Still, behind all the surface noise was a very good album I enjoyed hearing, and I’ll be on the lookout now for a better copy of it.
The album opens with its title track, Thelonious Monk’s renowned ballad embellished with Bernie Hanighen’s lyrics, and served up here in an arrangement by Benny Carter. Staton does a terrific job with it, moving from subdued phrases evoking the spirit of Billie Holiday to momentarily peak at a clear & powerful full belt before bringing it back down again. The record continues in suitably nocturnal mood, with a couple of uptempo numbers amid the torch songs.
An arrival in the post on Thursday: a magnificent & costly book which surely would be of interest to hardly anyone. This was Fine Papers at the Oxford University Press by John Bidwell, published in an edition of 300 copies at John and Rosalind Randle’s Whittington Press in 1999. It tells the story of deluxe publishing and fine letterpress printing at the OUP, which peaked in the ‘20s and ‘30s, and continued in a smaller way after WWII. When the University’s print department closed, its remaining stocks of hand-made and other high quality papers were acquired by John Randle, who used some of it for his own productions. The book discusses a variety of these papers, tracing their origins and how they were used, and, moreover, includes forty sheets of the papers themselves tipped in to its back pages.
[the] less plentiful sheets in this volume are now appearing before the public for the very last time. It is highly unlikely that papermakers will ever produce printing grades of this quality again.
I had been aware of this title for a decade or more but with second-hand asking prices typically in the £200-£400 range I’d balked at acquiring it. On ebay recently I caught sight of a copy going for significantly less than £200, and, having some funds to spare, finally got my hands on one. As well as being a highly informative reference for the paper nerd it’s a visual and tactile delight. The text is in an elegant Centaur face printed letterpress on mould-made Zerkall paper, while the tipped-in samples come in a panoply of shapes, sizes, shades and textures. It’s also quite the hefty tome – an elephant folio in a slipcase that’s too tall to fit in my bookshelves upstairs, and too deep to sit neatly among the outsize volumes in the downstairs bookcase. For the time being it will have to lie on its side.
Wine of the week was the Terre des Poètes Vaucluse from Aldi, a very tasty Rhône red from last year’s vintage in which Grenache and Syrah grapes apparently predominate. Says the label on the back: “…appealing red fruit aromas on the nose with suave cherry and spice notes on the palate” – I'll drink to that.