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Strix’ nest has many many metres of printed material. Some fiction, some fact. Atlases, Maps. Many of Poetry. Many for reference as well as Dictionaries for different languages. Some for gardening (yuck – too much like hard work) some for cooking (yum). Family photograph albums etc etc.
This love for the printed word may have started, or at least been encouraged, at Strix first school by a master who, in his classroom, had a Victorian printing press (a Columbian, if you are interested). He would ask us to select a poem, and then set it and print it ourselves. He would have many types of paper to choose from for us to use. Another master was a calligrapher in his spare time and he gave free lessons in the Cursive or Chancery script (Italic to you and I) and Strix spent many frustrating hours trying to master that hand using some of that handmade paper from the printing press.
Later in life, next door to where Strix worked, there was a small company who repaired and re-bound volumes from some of the great houses of Britain and abroad. There he learnt a little of the mysteries of goatskin skiver, acid free millboard, blocking, marbled endpapers and hand-sewn headbands. Two volumes that stick in Strix memory that he lusted after and passed through that place were a Kelmscott Chaucer and the recently printed complete Banks’s Florilegium. The price of each of which is beyond the imagining of mere mortals.