Charleston Press No 1

Nestled in the South Downs, Charleston was the country meeting place for the writers, painters and thinkers known as the Bloomsbury group. Now run by the Charleston Trust, the house is an excellent museum and visitor attraction, presented to look as it did when the family lived here in the 1950's. The walled garden was created by the artists Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant to designs by Roger Fry and features Mediterranean influences with plants chosen for their intense colour and silver foliage. These became the subject of many works over their long residence at Charleston.

Charleston Press is a new publication published by the Charleston Trust and includes includes newly commissioned essays exploring the themes, artists and stories of the exhibitions and programmes at Charleston, as well as articles marking important Bloomsbury anniversaries and events.
For this first issue, there are two different cover designs.

Size is 220x170mm, portrait and is perfect bound. The publication has an 8pp 'dustjacket' around the cover as you can see from the birdseye image below...

The below image shows the book (with the magenta cover) out of the dustjacket plus the wrap-around belly-band.

The 4pp cover is produced on our Colorset (100% Recycled) Magenta, 270gsm and is unprinted, being simply, but beautifully, embossed. 

Click on images to enlarge

The 84pp text is printed on our Omnia 120gsm. The reason that Omnia was chosen is because it would beautifully reproduce the wide variety of different media, the artworks, solid colours and dark photography and most importantly feel special - with the reproduction that you would expect on a silk or gloss but with a natural tactile uncoated feel.

...note the solid colours, not a special, made out of CMYK.

Charleston is hosting the first museum display of Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant’s Famous Women Dinner Service since it was created for Kenneth Clarke in 1932. After this the plates disappeared from public view and their whereabouts were unknown until very recently. The plates were created by Bell and Grant when they lived at Charleston and each plate depicts one famous woman, featuring figures as various as the Queen of Sheba, Sappho, Nell Gwynn, Emily Brontë and Elizabeth I. You can read more about the Dinner Service HERE.

Click on images to enlarge

Below image shows the 6mm spine, the perfect binding. The jacket is printed on Omnia 150gsm.

The wrap around bellyband (70mm high) is printed on our Sixties, 60gsm and because of the translucency, the background images show through.

...you can see the level of show through in the detail image below.

The reproduction on the Omnia is just something else, the level of detail and reproduction is superb as you can see the image below.

The publication is designed by Playne Design who have studios in London and Hastings. Creative Director is Clare Playne with production is handled by Simon Hack. Print production is by Pureprint. This is just an excellent example of a beautifully designed and well executed piece of print, entirely right for the subject.

The publication is available for sale HERE

https://www.charleston.org.uk/
http://www.playnedesign.co.uk/
https://www.pureprint.com/

Posted by Justin Hobson 12.03.2019