"Englishman wins chili cook off, sells recipe for $$$$"

This is a hot story. Audacious as it may sound David Esslemont, won a chili contest in 2012, scoring 10/10 from all three judges; but the audacity doesn’t stop there – next week he’ll be cooking his chili in California! How come? Read on.

Esslemont makes books, not your ordinary books, but fine, hand-printed hand-bound collectors items, many of them prize winners themselves, that are to be found in public and private collections worldwide. He has a passion not only for books but also for food and cooking, a passion, he finds, he shares with many others.

Now he’s turned the prize-winning recipe into an illustrated book with a 4-figure price tag. The from-scratch recipe (there is no chili powder here) includes for example, instructions for making ancho paste and vegetable stock, and serving it with a topping of sour cream mixed with lime juice, cilantro, Maldon salt, fresh habanero, Fresno and jalapeno chilies sautéed with garlic; and a garnish of vinegar-soaked scallions and a sprinkle of julienned red, orange and green chili peppers. The recipe is presented in a series of thirty-nine multi-color woodcuts. There is no text, apart from the occasional word carved on the wood blocks. The ingredients and directions are presented as pictograms.

The book is available in two bindings: twenty regular copies are stab-sewn in chili-red-cloth-covered boards; ten deluxe copies in an elegant, white alum-tawed pigskin binding, blind-tooled to look like a white linen tablecloth in the middle of which sits a bowl of chili sparking with gold. Find out more about the book on the artist’s website: solmentes.com.

Chili: a recipe was published this February at the Codex book fair in Berkeley and Esslemont will back in town next week to present a talk on Tuesday, September 10, titled “Making Books – and Chili” to the Colophon Club (members and guests only), one of the Bay Area’s three book clubs, described by the president, Susan Filter, as "a little more bohemian than the Roxburghe [Club]."

After a flying visit to Los Angeles to show his work to librarians at The Huntington and Clark libraries, Esslemont returns to give a workshop he is calling “Making Books and Chili – The Nitty-gritty of Publishing” ("What are you going to do with the books you make? Are you going to give them away, or perhaps sell them? Whatever you decide to do it’s called publishing, and there’s a whole lot more to publishing than you would think.") on Sunday, September 15, at the San Francisco Center for the Book. This will be followed in the evening by a “chili dinner” for which the artist will cook his legendary chili.

It’s not the first time Esslemont has cooked outside Iowa. In May this year he was invited to cook his chili for a private party in New York City! For a unique opportunity to see the book and taste the chili, come along on Sunday evening, September 15, from 6 to 7.30 pm, to SFCB, 375 Rhode Island Street, San Francisco. Contact: Malgosia Kostecka or Kathleen Burch, telephone (415) 565 0545.

David Esslemont studied fine art at the Central School of Art in London and was Artistic Director of the University of Wales Gregynog Press from 1985 to 1997. He has won several book design awards including the Felice Feliciano International Award for Book Design in 1991. Esslemont has lectured widely in the U.K. and U.S.A., and his work can be found in both private and public collections worldwide. His archive to 2005 is held at the University of Iowa. He now lives with his family on a farm in northeast Iowa and continues his work as an artist, designer, printer, bookbinder, publisher and farmer. ###

Twitter has a surprising and amusing pedigree

Nature-printed by Henry Bradbury

I am currently working on my text to accompany 'Florilegium Solmentes', a project inspired in part by Roderick Cave's forthcoming book Impressions of Nature. In this fascinating and comprehensive history of nature printing an unexpected topic arises – plagiarism. In his chapter 'Industrial espionage: the case of Henry Bradbury', Cave introduces an unfortunate pioneer of 'nature-printing' in nineteenth-century England.

Bradbury's father was a partner in Bradbury and Evans, printers and publishers of Punch and Charles Dickens among others, as well as some noteworthy volumes of nature printing. One of these was the four-volume Nature-printed British Sea-weeds, by William Grosart Johnstone and Alexander Croall, 'Nature-printed' by Henry Bradbury. Completed in 1860, the editors pen a lively Preface to the final volume:

'The quaint old writers of the sixteenth century were wont to chat sunnily and lovingly, through page upon page of "Preface" addressed to the "Courteous Reader," or "Kind Reader," or "Honored Reader," or, kindliest and gentlest of all, to "Dear Hearts," until he had been as the stone who went not with a "God bless you" to the perusal of the book so goldenly, and not without spice of wit and wisdom, and deftest deprecation, introduced. Alas! that the days of such "linkëd sweetness, long drawn out" in Prefaces, are vanished; and doubly alas! that no Elia! no Robert Southey of "The Doctor," has written their epicedium. And yet the Editors of "The British Algae." on concluding (for the time) their Book, feel greatly inclined to imagine the clock-of-time put back a couple of centuries, and to gossip and chat in old style with their "Courteous," "Kind," "Honored" Readers and "Dear Hearts" as in olden time. . . . Ah! thou "Athenaeum" critic how could'st thou flout and sneer against lily-handed maidens so daintily occupied as were the gentle constituents of "The British Algae!" Fie! fie! And, most erudite "Athenaeum" critic, in thy twitting of our letter press as too scientific, thou forgettest three things . . .'

This discovery of the word 'twitting' led me to the OED to find that twitter, has been in use since the fourteenth century: Chaucer, Boeth. III. met. ii. 54 (Camb. MS.) The Iangelynge bryd . . . enclosed in a streyht cage . . . twiterith desyrynge the wode with her swete voys.' Perhaps this gives a little more resonance to the plethora of tweets.

Returning to Bradbury, the young man was a member of the The Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce, and the Royal Institute of Great Britain and frequently addressed both institutions. He was a vigorous proponent of electrotyping and 'his' nature-printing techniques, stolen, it appears from Alois Auer and the k. k. Hof- und Staatsdruckerei in Vienna. I propose to publish Henry Bradbury's talks and the lively correspondence that ensued before he took his own life by drinking prussic acid on 2 September 1860. He was twenty-nine years old.

Nature-printed by Henry Bradbury