I produce letterpress cards, prints and ephemera, all printed with hand-set metal type and antique image blocks, as well as chapbooks, artworks and sundry curiosities; my home is in the borderlands of England and Wales.
I work from home in Cusop Dingle, about a mile outside Hay-on-Wye, and can be found fortnightly (on the 1st, 3rd & occasional 5th weeks of the month) at a stall in the Butter Market at Hay's Thursday market, as well as Hay's Saturday & special markets.
The name of my imprint, fallowpages, takes its inspiration from Harmas, the home of the French naturalist Jean-Henri Fabre. ‘Harmas’ means, in Provençal, a plot of uncultivated land, and indeed, Fabre used to keep a strip of just that in his garden to see what turned up. The name seemed a good fit for my odds, ends and various excursions, which make use of chance finds and unexpected arrivals, fallow land being a precondition for new growth.
I now have a shopify site - https://fallowpages.myshopify.com/ - with a selection of my wares, but it doesn't carry everything so please email me - ghobbs360@gmail.com - if anything you see here is not yet there, as most of the prints and cards on the site are available. Cards are £4, prints generally £15-£25 and can be surface mounted on suitable mountboard for a little extra.
I also print business cards, compliments cards, bookmarks and suchlike to order (take a look at the Commissions section for some examples), so do get in touch if you are interested, though please note I don't do wedding invitations! In the digital realm I also do layout and typesetting, so if you have content which needs turning into a book I can produce a print-ready PDF for you (see Book Design & Layout for some recent work).
A note on my practice. I print only from hand-set metal type and antique image blocks. Although it is possible to get polymer plates made of pretty much anything these days and print from them, I like the element of chance that comes with finding old image blocks and type and then deciding how to best put them to use. As such, this is a continuation of an artistic choice that began with my series of artist’s books – Colva Books – which I made between 2002-2014, in which chance finds – whether of text, artefact, or photographs – informed their content and design. The fun, the skill, and the magic lies in reinterpreting what is already with us and giving it new life.
Thank you!