Fine Press/ Limited Edition Books:

Completed Fall 2008
Winner: Gregynog Prize 2009

Mimpish Squinnies: Reginald Farrer’s Short Guide to Worthless Plants
The Lone Oak Press, Petersham, Massachusetts, 2007


Turn the Pages

15 full-page multi-block color and hand-colored relief engravings by Abigail Rorer
Introduction by Maureen Sanderson
Design and text printed by Michael Russem of Kat Ran Press, Florence, Massachusetts
Fairbank type set by Michael & Winifred Bixler, Skaneateles, New York
Text printed on Kozo papers in the French fold style.
Binding by Mark Tomlinson of Easthampton, Massachusetts
Bound with a handmade plant fiber paper over boards with a green leather spine and label & enclosed in a clamshell case covered in Chinese silk with a leather spine label
11” x 6 ½”, 28 pages

Edition of 40:
10 deluxe copies accompanied by an extra suite of prints as a boxed set
30 regular copies with clam shell case- 24 for sale

Regular edition $900 - SOLD OUT
Deluxe edition $1450 - SOLD OUT

Reginald Farrer (1880-1920) was a British plantsman, plant explorer, & prolific writer who was one of the first to promote rock gardening and alpine plants. The text of Mimpish Squinnies consists of fourteen plant descriptions from Farrer’s The English Rock Garden and are of plants that he particularly disliked and described as only he could, with humor, wit, acerbity and anthropomorphism. The title of the book, Mimpish Squinnies, uses two of the many, almost nonsense, words that Farrer employs in some of his descriptions. Accompanying the text are fourteen full-color plant portraits using his descriptions as inspiration along with the structure of the actual plant plus a portrait of Farrer with a short biographical note.