The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe

Bound by Kate Holland

The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by CS Lewis
London: Geoffrey Bles. 1950
Collection of Bruce Munro

The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe is number 1 of a 3 volume set. Volume 2 is The Voyage of the Dawn Treader and Volume 3 is The Magician's Nephew

Full alum tawed calf with reverse offset printing, applied genuine palladium leaf, pearl lustre applied with an albumen solution, hand tooled white pigment snowflakes. Doublures of hand dyed alum tawed calfskin from with pearl lustre and hand tooled white pigment snowflakes. Endpapers are a manipulated photograph of frozen grass. Hand sewn silk endbands. Hand coloured edges. Transparent clouded vellum backed with Bockingford 190 gsm watercolour paper and lined with green Zerkall Ingres.

"Narnia - For me, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe is about the miracle of birth, the wonder of the seasons, that spring inevitably comes after winter, the snow and ice melt, the green shoots push their way through. Though worryingly we have had far too few of those frozen days these last winters. I wanted to capture a cold, calm, quiet world with the merest hints of life emerging. My main inspiration was the sunlight on a freezing foggy dog walk early one morning. The way the light dissipated through the clouds to give a mystical, ethereal, almost magical glow to the countryside. The light of the sun alludes to the light from the lamppost in the woods in Narnia. And the snowflakes reference the lamppost sculpture for Minnesota Landscape Centre by @brucemunrostudio who commissioned this binding. The name of the sculpture is Good Seed, again harking back to that miracle of life contained in a tiny, anonymous bundle. They were tooled borrowing some of the huge collection of hand tools @georgebayntun."

Kate is happy to undertake commissions for design bindings.

For further examples of her work please go to www.katehollandbooks.co.uk and on her Instagram @katehollandbooks.