Thomas Hardy and his first wife, Emma, were estranged for twenty years at the time of her death in 1912.  They had found it first difficult, then impossible to communicate with each other and fourteen years before her death she retreated to the attic of their Dorchester house.  It was there in the attic that she died on November 27, 1912, surrounded by writings she had made in secret that detailed Hardy’s cruelty and the breakdown of their marriage.  

After Emma’s death, Hardy read her memoirs and was struck by an avalanche of grief.  He returned to the Cornish coast where he had courted Emma when they met in 1870 and over the next two years he wrote what became Poems of 1912-13 — intense poems of loss and guilt.  It is from Poems of 1912-13 that the poems in Green Blades were selected by its artist, Mark Cazalet.  Francis and Nicholas McDowall, proprietors of The Old Stile Press, noted that Cazalet arranged the sequence “to suggest Hardy’s gradual reconciliation to guilt and grief, resolving into a dawning sense of acceptance.”

I had not read Hardy’s elegies before I encountered them in this Old Stile Press edition and to this day when I open its cover and reveal the expansive page spreads within, I am struck by a wave of remembrance of the night I first experienced it — late in the evening in the still quiet after the house was asleep, bent over the book laid open on the coffee table, a window open to the chilly autumn air and a candle perfuming the room with woody scents of dark bark and dried herbs, absorbed in the immense sadness of the poems written in the raw months after Emma’s death.  I’ve come back to it many times since and it has become one of my favorite Old Stile Press books.

There are twenty poems in the Green Blades selection and each is accompanied by a massive two-color image, formed from overlaying one woodcut and one linocut, all printed from the original blocks. The poems are usually printed alongside the artwork but sometimes verses are nestled inside or spread across the images, the spacious Centaur text always printed in black ink. The images are excellent, evoking Hardy’s experience rather than strictly matching location or era, and the layering of the two blocks results in maximum chromatic effect. Those in the vicinity of London may want to check out Cazalet’s current woodcut exhibition, New Growth, Spring, on view now through May 28, 2022 at Serena Morton’s gallery in Ladbroke Grove.

The Green Blades book is large and a full page spread is over 27 inches wide when open.  For me, it is only feasible to read comfortably on a table.  Happily, the binding opens with ease and the book lays flat without offering any resistance.  The white Fabriano Tiziano paper has a toothy grain that peeks through Cazalet’s images in areas.  The book is bound in marigold-yellow cloth and covered in paper printed with one of Cazalet’s images.  The Main state is issued in a folding grass green cloth-covered slipcase while the Special edition is presented in a solander box and accompanied by a suite of signed prints. The chemise-style slipcase is one that very few other books in my collection use and I wasn’t expecting it when the book arrived but is has the benefit of preventing the paper-covered boards from becoming rubbed like they would if slid in and out of a traditional slipcase.

The McDowalls’ daughter, Cressida Maher, has assumed the management of the press and can be contacted to order those Old Stile Press books that remain in stock.  I believe that the main state of Green Blades is still available at the time of this writing and would urge those interested to reach out to Cress to order.

EDITION DETAILS:

• Author: Thomas Hardy
• Illustrator: Mark Cazalet
• Illustrations: Woodcuts and linocuts.  22 in total.  All printed from the original blocks.
• Printer: Nicholas McDowall at The Old Stile Press, Monmouthshire, UK
• Binder: The Fine Book Bindery, Wellingborough, UK
• Paper: Fabriano Tiziano
• Type: Centaur
• Limitation: 210 copies
• States: Two: 1) Main state of 200 copies, numbered 1-200 and presented in a green folding slipcase; and 2) Special state of 10 copies, numbered  I-X and accompanied by a suite of prints signed by the artist, presented in a solander box.
• Binding: Bound in yellow cloth partially covered in paper with a print from the edition wrapping from front to back
• Pages: 48 pages
• Dimensions: 13” x 13.75”
• Signed by the artist (Mark Cazalet)
• Publication date: 2007
• Publication price: £300 (main state) and £650 (special state)