The drive from San Francisco down to Los Angeles is familiar to me, a Los Angeles transplant myself. Many of my acquaintances who also moved to California from other states have done it too while many native Californians I know haven’t. Maybe if you’re from California it’s one of those things you feel like you can do anytime so of course you haven’t yet gotten around to doing it at all.
Coastline is a book both for those who haven’t yet driven PCH south, winding slowly along the cracked asphalt of the historic highway as it snakes along cliffs above the Pacific, and for those who have. It is an oblong folio-sized visual account of British artist Hannah Cousins’ ten-day road trip down the coast, a trip planned at the last minute to help her break out of a creative block. It seems to have been a good strategy – the book is bursting with forty-seven engravings and pochoir illustrations that chronicle the trip from its beginning in San Francisco to its end in Los Angeles with stops in Carmel-by-the-Sea, Big Sur, San Luis Obispo, Los Alamos, Santa Barbara, Ojai, and Malibu along the way.
Hannah Cousins is a graduate of Camberwell College of Arts in London and this is her first book. Her prose is straightforward and unornamented, like her engravings. In millennial style she journals not only about the places she visits but also about food and coffee consumed along the way. “Our main incentive for visiting anywhere is food,” she proclaims, following through with thirty-plus mentions of food and drink (for those who wonder, yes, of course she grabbed an In-n-Out burger en route).
For me, the main appeal of Coastline is its illustrations, which are excellent in their simplicity and ability to evoke California and its spirit. Hannah Cousins communicates fleeting glimpses of the coast in a muted color palette of sea, sand, and stone. She engraves with a modern hand, capturing beaches and palm trees in a clean style like an elevated version of that which you might see in the art decorating the walls of the hipster coffee shops on Abbott Kinney Boulevard that she visited at the tail end of her journey.
In addition to linocut illustrations, each printed from the block (or blocks, depending on the image), Cousins utilizes pochoir, a labor-intensive process where stencils are used to hand color layers of an image, one color first, then the next, then the next, one at a time until the illustration is complete. The cumulative effect is beautiful. Flora, fauna, and edifices are all expertly portrayed. Sandpipers are captured mid-scuttle. Plumes of pampas grass sway in the coastal breeze. The Golden Gate Bridge towers above the clouds and the Malibu Pier juts up from the Pacific at low tide. Reading through Coastline and enjoying its vignettes, those who have already wandered down the coast from San Francisco to Los Angeles are reminded of the drive – the emotions and memories stirred up by the land and sea – and those who haven’t yet planned out their expeditions will be left eager to begin.
From a technical perspective, the production is superb. Pat Randle of Nomad Letterpress has skillfully printed the text and blocks. Roger Grech bound the book beautifully in Cousins’ selection of delicately nubbed Japanese cloth the color of a white sand beach. The endpapers are engravings of topographic contour lines from Big Sur. There is no errata slip at the back to account for the book’s few typographical errors but apart from this – and I acknowledge that for many printers errata slips are a bygone practice and I am probably one of only a handful of readers who actually want to see a corrigenda slipped into the back of a book – I have no complaints. Hannah Cousins’ freshman effort is full of promise and she’s already fast at work on a follow-up book, revolving around engravings of the Southwest USA. I’m looking forward to it.
EDITION DETAILS:
Author: Hannah Cousins
Illustrator: Hannah Cousins
Illustrations: Linocuts and pochoir. Forty-seven in total.
Printer: Pat Randle, Nomad Letterpress, Cheltenham, UK
Binder: Roger Grech, Shipley, Yorkshire, UK
Paper: Zerkall mould-made with deckle edges
Type: Monotype Walbaum (series 374) with Rudolf Koch’s Kabel and Zeppelin for display. Ornaments designed at Weather Bird Press and cast at L.A. Type, Whittier, CA.
Limitation: 125 copies
States: Three. 1.) Standard state of copies 1-105 bound in cream-colored Japanese book cloth; 2) lettered state of copies A-O bound in half-leather and including a suite of illustrations; 3) roman numeral state of copies i-v bound in full leather and including a suite of illustrations plus an extra linocut. All states are slipcased.
Unsigned.
Publication date: February 2019
Publication price: £235
