Rats Constructing Labyrinths:
Experiments in Chance, Constraint, Disruption and Automation

Ruskin Arts, 2024

Collecting the work of MA Graphic Design students, who for this project were asked to discard ideas of controlled and precise problem solving, and instead engage with imaginative ‘problem creation’.

Auguries of Innocence:
First Experiences with Letterpress

Ruskin Arts, 2023

Each year from 2014 to 2018 graphic design students at Cambridge School of Art were assigned a brief: to typeset and print in letterpress a couplet from William Blake’s ‘Auguries of Innocence’. None of them had used letterpress before.

Visions of Lucian Vol. 4:
Philosophies for Sale

Mulita Small Editions, 2022

In Lucian's ‘Philosophies for Sale’ we find the literary satirist at his mischievous best. Turning his attention to the subject of wisdom, he invites us to attend an auction of famous philosophers attended by a largely dispassionate audience of tyre-kicking dealers. Zeus and Hermes serve as auctioneers.

Affinities:
A Book of Images

Volume, 2021

An exploration of echoes and resonances across two thousand years of visual culture, Affinities is a single captivating sequence of images that unfurls according to a dreamlike logic.

The Book of Imaginary Beings

2021

For this special Anglo-Argentine project, design students from Cambridge School of Art and Universidad Torcuato Di Tella, Buenos Aires, worked together to celebrate the Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges and his timeless Book of Imaginary Beings.

The Public Domain Review:
Selected Essays Vol. VII

PDR Press, 2020

A stellar cast of writers including Philip Pullman, Mike Jay and Angus Trimble set the course for this seventh volume of Selected Essays, steering us through twelve centuries of quirk and curiosity.

Visions of Lucian Vol. 3:
Remarks Addressed to an Illiterate Book-Fancier / In Spite of Your Art

Mulita Small Editions, 2020

Lucian’s discovery that an acquaintance’s books are not for reading but for display results in him publishing a vicious poison pen letter.

Ways of Thinking

Ruskin Arts, 2020

A multi-layered, multi-dimensional journey through the inner worlds of 20 creative practitioners and the ways in which they have found and made use of inspiration.

Visions of Lucian Vol. 2:
The Fly / The Mole

Mulita Small Editions, 2020

In The Fly, written around 145AD, Lucian defends the humble housefly. In describing the fly’s anatomy, character and virtues, and its place in literature, Lucian reveals his uncanny ability to detect and respond to every tiny detail of his subject.

The Public Domain Review:
Selected Essays Vol. VI

PDR Press, 2019

The sixth annual book from The Public Domain Review, gathering together thirteen of the best essays from 2018.

At the Flea Market

Mulita Small Editions, 2019

Drawn from only the briefest of interactions, all the voices of the flea market are here in these short, sweet, and often unexpectedly poignant stories.

The Public Domain Review:
Selected Essays Vol. V

PDR Press, 2018

The fifth annual book from The Public Domain Review, gathering together fourteen of the best essays from 2017 with more than 100 illustrations.

Oh Excellent Air Bag:
Under the Influence of Nitrous Oxide, 1799–1920

PDR Press, 2016

The inhalation of nitrous oxide, also known as ‘laughing gas’, would go on to inspire more than a century of extraordinary writings that combined the scientific, the poetic, and the philosophical in a wholly new way. This volume collects the most striking examples.

The Public Domain Review:
Selected Essays Vols. 1-4

PDR Press, 2014-17

Four volumes of Selected Essays gathering the most stimulating, entertaining and thought-provoking articles from the first six years of The Public Domain Review.

Divine Comedy:
Lucian Versus the Gods

The Public Domain Review, 2016

An essay exploring the history of the 26 comic sketches that make up Dialogues of the Gods, in which the second-century satirist Lucian of Samosata took the popular images of the Greek gods and redrew them as greedy, needy, power-mad opportunists.

Garden Cities of To-Morrow

2014

A unique edition of Ebenezer Howard's Garden Cities of To-Morrow (1902) commissioned for the exhibition Letchworth: A Vision of Utopia, and now on permanent display at the International Garden Cities Exhibition, Letchworth.

Spring Sessions

Spring Sessions Journal, 2014

The Spring Sessions is a cross-disciplinary programme of artists’ talks, seminars, workshops, walks, dinners and screenings held annually in Amman, Jordan. This text is adapted from my diary, later published in the Spring Sessions Journal.

The Serious and the Smirk

The Public Domain Review, 2013

An essay exploring the history of the smile through the ages of portraiture, from Leonardo’s Mona Lisa to Alexander Gardner’s photographs of Abraham Lincoln.

Xavier Veilhan:
Promenade

Gascoyne / Atelier Xavier Veilhan, 2012

Oversized catalogue in English and French to accompany Promenade, an exhibition of Xavier Veilhan’s polymorphic sculptures set in the grounds of Hatfield House.