Disgressed

This is the van. We’re touring Scotland as of tomorrow: Stirling to Killin to Oban to Fort William to Inverness to Nairn to Aberdeen to St Andrews to Edinburgh (just after the Festival).

It’s a bit hard to believe, but I’ve got no-one to blame but myself. Many, many years ago in my youth, my parents and I did a somewhat similar trip in one of those classic old Dormobiles with the fan-folding pop-up roof. I’ve always remembered this trip with affection – I particularly liked the west coast, though our trip across to Skye was pretty much a waste of time, since the whole place was shrouded in such thick fog it was impossible to see more than a few feet of it at a time.

Anyway, a few months ago I was reminiscing about this in a rambling kind of way, and happened to say it would be nice to do something similar. Unexpectedly I found that not only were my words being listened to; they were producing practical agreement. This should not have been so surprising, really: Katharine comes from Scotland but hasn’t seen much of it outside Edinburgh for many years now. Elizabeth and Sarah weren’t so keen until they were reassured that Scotland has beaches.

I still didn’t really think it was going to happen, but I looked around some sites about camper van hire, and we talked vaguely about whether it was best to hire down here and drive up or fly to Scotland and pick up a van there. Then Katharine came home and told me the people round the corner had their van on eBay – but if we wanted it, of course, a deal could be struck… It cost about as much to buy the thing outright as it would have done to hire one for two weeks, which means if we sell it again afterwards – even at a substantial loss – we’ve actually saved money. Somehow that sounds more convincing when someone else says it.

It has to be admitted that the van is not in quite the pristine condition you would expect from a hired vehicle. The passenger side door doesn’t open, for example: there’s a solar panel which doesn’t seem to be connected to anything, and shower fittings which haven’t been (though I think the word ’shower’ wouldn’t really cover the experience of standing in a tiny cupboard while tepid water drips intermittently down your back). But that all adds to the authentic camping experience.

Don’t you think?

Martin Frost has a fascinating site about fore-edge paintings, of which he has produced thousands of examples. These are paintings done on the edge of the pages of a book in such a way that they only appear when you fan out the pages. Once you’ve painted your picture on on the fanned-out pages, you close them again and then gild the edges to ensure nothing is visible normally. It is possible to fit two different paintings on one set of pages: one appears when the pages are fanned one way, and the other when they go the opposite way. It is further possible to replace gilding with a third picture on the closed fore-edge, though I imagine this must require great care and delicacy if all the pictures are to be clear and unsmudged.

Some of the results are really remarkable, and I wondered why there didn’t seem to be any fore-edge printing. But I suppose the technical difficulties are considerable. Painting does not exert much pressure, but it would be extremely difficult to hold the pages fanned out and still while printing on them, without damaging the book. I suppose in principle there is another way of doing it: since the fore-edge picture are made up of tiny slices at the edge of each page, you could print the required slivers straight on to each page in more or less the normal way. But you would need to print with absolute accuracy, and right in the place where it is normally impossible to print at all – the very edge of the page. Producing the correct sliver for each page would also be, as they say, a non-trivial task.

Having good fore-edge paintings clearly adds immensely to the value of a book, and I imagine it might easily be the case that the value added by the secret, or at least unobtrusive, paintings is more than that of the original, undecorated book. I think there’s some sort of moral in there somewhere, but I’ll leave the pages of metaphor unfanned on this occasion.