Christmas is coming

Christmas is upon us, and it is time to stock up on wrapping paper, mince pies and cards.

Libre Livre has a range of hand printed cards that are an ideal way to bypass the increasing standardization and commercialization of the season.

A salutary tale

This week I have been grappling with IT problems - seemingly intractable at one point, which had an oddly simple solution.

I use the Ubuntu operating system, and this week I decided it was time to upgrade to the next distribution. without me realizing it, my broadband service was disrupted by the recent poor weather with the result that the upgrade files did not download correctly. The result was that the machine crashed every time I tried to boot up, giving just the mysterious comment that "Postfix" was being reloaded.

Matters got worse: although I could access the boot menu the upgrade would not load correctly from the CD I had made. The final course left open was to boot into recovery mode - for which I need to be able to access the "grub" menu. This menu is accessed by pressing Esc at an early stage as the machine starts up, but the pc would not recognize the Esc key and although I could access the BIOS it would not register any changes.

Stuck! ... after several hour of head scratching the solution turned out to be simply changing the BIOS battery (cost £2) lodged deep on the motherboard, a bit unnerving, but easy enough, and after that everything was downhill.

Traditional Clay Marbles

Libre Livre has recently introduced a new product: hand decorated clay marbles made by Marbled Arts of Florence

To find out more about these fabulous antiques of the future, click Marbles

The Wedding Cake Church

Not a great picture - my mobile phone is getting long in the tooth, but several people have asked me why St Brides is known as the wedding cake church - and, hopefully, this will show the tiers of the tower sufficiently to give the answer.

St Brides Printing Library

Had a splendid day at St Brides. They have an exhibition hall which houses a good collection of antique printing presses, ranging from an original wooden frame, similar to the one(s) I imagine Gutenberg used, through examples of the Columbian, Albion and Stanhope. The library itself has an excellent selection of books on printing and related subjects, and a pleasant light airy and peaceful reading room.

Printing Library

In the next few days I'm off to visit St Bride's Printing Library. This charming library - one of the few vestiges of the printing industry still located around Fleet St - is just behind the "wedding cake church", whose towers resembles, and by all accounts was the inspiration for, tiered wedding cakes. The workshop of Wynkyn de Worde, Gutenberg's first and greatest assistant, was just a few hundred yards away, so for letterpress folk this is hallowed ground. Let's hope a bit of the magic rubs off.

Display cabinet

This week we put up a small display cabinet in the Star Brewery in which we will be showing some of the products featured on the Libre Livre website, letterpress cards, notebooks and some marbled paper.

New Website - done

At last, I've completed the new version of the Libre Livre website. One new feature that I am particularly pleased with are the small icons that accompany opening pages on browser tabs and address bar. They are a great way of giving the site some identity.

My drop down menus and "action buttons" may seem a bit clunky, but I hope that they will be reasonably intuitive to use.

The main purpose of any website is to make the content accessible, and the Libre Livre content is very much focused on the fabulous Florentine marbled papers that we have started selling. Do take look: Florentine Papers

New Web Site

One of reasons this blog has not been updated as regularly as it ought of late is that I have been working on a re-design of the Libre Livre website, to reflect our recent appointment as the official retailer of Marbled Arts of Florence.

The website is more or less completed now, and I am particularly pleased with the mini-icons which should show up in your address bar when you access it - or save it as a bookmark: not a bad idea for anybody who is interested in book arts, marbled paper etc.