Posh books article

FS gets a look-in as part of this article on the posh book trend.

https://www.thetimes.com/article/3addee09-598a-4f84-a89c-c9e3ced20006

It took "eight or nine years to plan and produce" the Hobbit LE?!

Behind a paywall. But I'm not really surprised about the 8 or 9 years given that the illustrator / Alan Lee is very much in demand and you usually have to wait quite some time for someone like that to be available, then do their work, and go from there. Negotiations with the publisher would also take some time and patience, I assume.

>3 SF-72: Article should be free if it's your first visit to the site, but yes, otherwise it requires payment. Not a site I hit often so it came up for me. The article features the binding work of Kate Holland, who brought the article to my attention initially.

My main takeaway is we can expect a heck of a lot more sprayed edges from FS for the foreseeable future.

FS publishing director:

"We have a really obsessive audience"
"It’s a very cultish thing, being obsessed with beautiful books."

It’s sounds almost like a passage in a SF novel where books are admired as shiny objects on the shelf and nobodies quite sure of their original purpose.

>5 A.Nobody: That does seem to be the gimmick du jour.

>5 A.Nobody: though I scoff at the practice in common, poorly made trade hardbacks that they later sell as 'special editions', for the Folios at least it would serve a purpose: in my view a sprayed edge gives a minimum protection or easy concealment of foxing on the book edges, which is common if you live in a very humid environment.