Exhibits from the Museum & the City is an illustrated poetry chapbook written by Becca Drake during their time as the poet-in-residence at the Hull Maritime Museum. The poems and original linocut illustrations within are inspired by the objects, history and surroundings of the Hull Maritime Museum and the city’s surrounding natural spaces. The project was co-funded by Hull City Council and The National Lottery Heritage Fund, Hull: Yorkshire’s Maritime City. The layout of the chapbook is inspired by the 1956 Catalogue of the Maritime Museum, Kingston Upon Hull.

A free PDF of Exhibits is available to download here. For further information and prices, please email thinicepress@york.ac.uk.

Becca Drake is a writer, poet, and critical-creative based in York. She/they completed a PhD in medieval English and Icelandic literature at the University of York (2023). Her/their work focuses on east coast histories and literature, maritime environments, and the place of the human in the natural world. Becca was poet-in-residence at the Hull Maritime Museum (2021). Becca has poems in Reliquiae, Black Bough, Fly on the Wall, and was highly commended in the Hive Young Writers competition (2022).

The printing house is a breeding ground for mistakes, home to botches, curses, and repairs. Welcome, gentle reader, to the printed page and its inky accidents. Joseph Moxon, author of England’s first vernacular printing guide, depicts a printroom bustling with error. Formes dance or choke, type hangs and falls, run past limits. Getting it wrong, setting it right: this is a rite of passage for each compositor, every pressman, each unlucky devil. Common Errors of the Press is a rash bid to navigate this treacherous terrain, combining experiment, scholarship and copious inaccuracies.

In it, practice and theory collide, as Helen Smith writes about and replicates historical printing errors, providing an intimate view of the relationship between presswork, missteps, and meaning. It offers a pithy tale of print gone wrong, replete with Smith’s unhappy errors. But Smith also explores what it means to get it right, and how errant tools, faulty copy and tired hands tangle to create something exquisitely, gleefully imprecise. Common Errors of the Press is an erratic, inventive typographic tribute to infelicity.

For further information and prices, please email thinicepress@york.ac.uk.

Helen Smith is Professor of Renaissance Literature at the University of York. She is author of Grossly Material Things: Women and Book Production in Early Modern England and co-editor of Renaissance Paratexts, The Oxford Handbook of the Bible in Early Modern England, and Conversions: Gender and Religious Change in Early Modern England. Helen is currently writing a scholarly monograph on matter and its metamorphoses in early modern England.

Flora & Fauna is a book of poems designed and printed by its author, where losses great and small are replayed in life’s deleted scenes. A pair of abandoned dogs discuss their future. A colleague’s innocent gesture triggers an internal crisis. George Sand rethinks her family holiday with Frederic Chopin. A series of mini-elegies for a sister, a seventeenth-century printer, and the actor Paul Walker make it ‘hard enough remembering / history is not your life’. The book ends with poems for a young niece, who also helps remember that ‘everything will be okay’.

For further information and prices, please email thinicepress@york.ac.uk.

J.T Welsch has published a number of poetry books, including Orchids (2010), Waterloo (2012), and Hell Creek Anthology (2015). He is also co-editor of Wretched Strangers: Borders Movement Homes (2018) and author of The Selling and Self-Regulation of Contemporary Poetry (2020). J.T. lives with his partner and dog in York, where he is a lecturer and printer at the University of York.

Jonna Lisowiec is a designer, illustrator, and hand-lettering artist, particularly known for her bold style of illustration focused on the beauty of nature and narratives inspired by folklore. She graduated from Edinburgh College of Art with a BA (Hons) in Illustration, and holds an MA in Advertising & Design from the University of Leeds. As well as her own artistic output, her clients and partners include Penguin Random House, Ebury, and The Folklore Society.