The Bodleian Library of Oxford University in Oxford, England, was celebrating 400 Years of Shakespeare’s Sonnets in an exhibition that ran from January to November 2016.
In a sonnet cycle of 154 poems, addressed to both female and male love interests, William Shakespeare described every shade of passion while mocking the tones of courtly love. The Sonnets continue to fascinate readers over 400 years after his death. The ‘Shakespeare’s Sonnets 2016’ project invited printers around the world to produce one sonnet apiece, in any style and by any method of relief printing. The results form a multi-lingual, multi-media, and multi-dimensional collection.
The collection was presented to the Bodleian at an event in November 2016.
We chose Sonnet 112 because it had the word “impression” in its first line.
Here is a video of Patrick Stewart reading the sonnet. Over a period of several months he read all 154 of them. You’ll see our contribution below the video.
We were excited to be involved in something Shakespearian-Bodleian-poetic-British. We like doing these kinds of collaborative projects and almost always use them as a way to promote the Lead Graffiti brand as experimental, creative, and conceptual. As a matter of course we will figure what others are going to do and then try to improve on them in a half dozen or more ways. Scale, number of runs, use of the letterpress process, playing with type and image, marrying multiple elements, etc.
We like including and working with imagery. We also like placing things in a historical perspective as we are often humbled by the thought that we are part of a continuing thread that goes back to the work of Gutenberg. We try to live up to some level of that responsibility.
Printed : May 2021
Client : Bodleian Library, Oxford University
Size : 14.5” x 22.5”
Type & image : portrait is a copperplate, all text is photopolymer
Runs : 5 (Shakespeare portrait, 1609 text, 2016 text, blind debossed dates, & credit line)
Paper : Somerset Textured White, 300gsm
Press : Vandercook Universal III
Edition : 35 (The Bodleian only wanted 1 copy)