A beautiful, small, hand-printed and hand-bound book is currently being produced by Tim Preston to mark next year's Alfred Russel Wallace anniversary. Tim's day job is in magazine publishing, and his hobby is also publishing - using a mechanical Albion hand printing press which dates from the 1870's (see photo below). Once the pages have been printed Tim will glue in all the illustrations and the books will then be professionally hand bound in cloth. Only 100 individually numbered copies will be produced and almost half have been reserved already. If you would like to reserve a copy then please contact Tim at timpress@me.com. Tim estimates that they will cost only about £50 GBP each - a bargain for a book that is entirely produced by hand!
Not only is the book special because of how it is being produced, but it will be of interest to scholars since all the letters featured in it have been carefully transcribed by Tim from the original manuscripts. This is the first time that accurate copies of all the original surviving correspondence relating to the publication of Wallace's Ternate essay has been published together in this way.
Another good reason to buy a copy is that Tim has kindly offered to give all profits from sales of the book to the Wallace Memorial Fund as a contribution to its campaign to raise money for a life-size bronze statue of Wallace for the Museum. The statue campaign needs all the help it can get as the deadline for fundraising is the end of January 2013, and there is still a massive £38,000 which needs to be found!
To advertise the book Tim has produced a postcard, the front and back of which are reproduced below.
Front of the 'postcard'
Back of the 'postcard
Tim's ancient Albion printing press
