Robert Lacey – writing below for Book Brunch – brings together vintage sketches and modern eco-friendly production techniques in Nursery Rhymes with Pictures.
This bouncy butler inspired my latest book. I first encountered his lively figure two Decembers ago prancing across the front of a Christmas card – and the sheer vigour of the drawing held my eye. The text on the back of the card revealed that the butler had been sketched by Claud Lovat Fraser, a promising young stage designer who died in 1921 at the tragically early age of just 31, his lungs corroded by the chlorine gas he had inhaled in the trenches of the First World War.
The card explained that many of Fraser’s vivid drawings had been preserved in the archives of the Royal Academy of Arts. So, early in the new year I headed to Piccadilly to visit the RA library. There I encountered a panorama of bold and vigorous artistry, the chief treasure being a slender volume of nursery rhymes illustrated by Fraser for his daughter Helen.
The 46 pages leapt to life with Fraser’s inventiveness, but more than half of his drawings were black and white. The publishing technology of the 1920s simply did not allow the production of a full colour book, and it occurred to me how wonderful it would be, a century later, to pay that modern tribute to this forgotten creation.
I could immediately identify the ideal artist to apply the colourful touch – Ben Coppin, a 25-year-old illustrator from South-East London with whom I was then working on the sardonic cartoons illustrating my book Battle of Brothers about the rift between the princes William and Harry (not to mention their wives).
While we were applying some colour to Lovat’s drawings, I suggested to Ben that we might also update the pictures to reflect the current world that our young readers encounter around them in all its 21st century diversity and disability – without neglecting the enduring delights of stolen pigs and broken eggs. Nursery rhymes for now, in fact…
Updated content also called for updated production techniques – traditional books consume so much of the planet’s resources. I’ve heard it argued, for example, that eco-respectful storybooks should only exist online. But it is, surely, the very essence of nursery rhymes that they provide a shared reading experience for children and adults when they are gathered together, with the simple, rhyming words on their pages also providing the routes by which children can learn to read for themselves.
There’s just no avoiding the paper! So how about making sure that the pages are at least sustainable – FSC (Forest Stewardship Council) certified, meaning that a new tree gets planted, or is allowed to regenerate, for each one cut down? How about using paper that has been recycled from used paper cups and other consumer waste for the decorative endpapers (based on the harlequin design from a fairy tale that Lovat illustrated)? And when it came to the exterior data band providing the details of the price and ISBN at the back of the book, I discovered an innovative paper regenerated from the vegetable fibre of brewers’ hops.
I was able to enlist all these eco-friendly techniques because I was publishing the book myself. Don’t get me wrong – I’ve had some wonderful publishers in my enjoyable half century of writing. Such success as I have enjoyed owes much to the skills of talented publishing editors, designers and publicists. But I’ve always had a yen to try publishing myself. So, I drew down some of my pension pot and, on the advice of friends, headed for the Gomer Press at the western tip of Wales. In London, I worked with production designer David Mackintosh who devised the literally sparkling foiled jacket that is worthy of Lovat Fraser himself.
All that remained was to find a name for my publishing house in its freshly-purchased north-west London Post Office box – and for this I turned back to Lovat himself. Writing from the trenches in 1916, the painter-turned-poet visualised children at home making paper boats to float imaginary treasure galleons into the lakes and rivulets of the English countryside:
O master mariners! whose seas
Are millers’ pond and parson’s stream,
Who send your paper argosies
To lands the further side of dream . . .
In this scenario, Lovat suggested, the mysteries and morals of nursery rhymes can be seen as veritable treasure fleets of rhyming magic – and his metaphor suggested to me, in turn, the perfect name for my own, new publishing house!
So, I do hope you will consider buying a £20 treasure galleon for yourself (or for your children or grandchildren) if this, my first book from Paper Argosies, should come floating in your direction. I will be dedicating a share of any profits to the library of the Royal Academy of Arts in acknowledgment of their role in preserving the work of Claud Lovat Fraser, with another proportion going to the Dartmoor-based charities Storybook Dads and Storybook Mums, who enable imprisoned parents to record nursery rhymes and other bedtime stories for their children back at home.
Nursery Rhymes with Pictures by Claud Lovat Fraser, edited by Robert Lacey and illustrated by Ben Coppin, is published by Paper Argosies on 3 October 2024, £20.
Preorder your copy
Next Page Books
