Liver & Lights
Available publications.
All books are plus £2.00 postage per copy
Order two copies and postage is free!!
Payment by cheque to Liver & Lights Scriptorium,
229 Railton Rd, London, SE24 0LX.
Bank Transfer on request to
hanksoake@gmail.com
or:
L&L No 2. 1985
Similar in form and content to the first, with some additional contributors. Writers Tim Pownall, Lord Byron and Cream Lyricist Pete Brown among them. More of a ‘zine in feeling than the first. The book, like the first was bound in old shirt boxes scavenged from outside the Sims Reed shop in Jermyn Street. The book was reviewed by Dr Stephanie Brown in AN mag…she said it was brilliant, which made us very happy. Launched with an exhibition of our paintings at the Camden Institute. Printed offset litho in an edition of 210.
I have a few copies scavenged from second hand shops etc…rebound. £30.00
L&L No.14. A Book of Discarded Things. 1st Edition1992. 2nd 1993.
I had been collecting interesting rubbish from the streets outside my studio and arranging it into neat piles for some time. I was beginning to wonder what on earth I was going to do with it and then had a quiet eureka moment- make a book entirely from rubbish as a gesture of empathy for all the abandoned people of the world, old people, children, wives, countries…So, thats what I did…the books are entirely constructed from abandoned stuff…paper, covers, the lot. I made two complete editions of 70 books.
A first edition of 70 was installed as one piece at the Conway Hall, with viewers diminishing the display by taking away copies one by one. A second edition was made, with a new introduction and frontispiece and launched at The Eagle Gallery later the next year. Proceeds from this edition were donated to the homeless charity Centrepoint.
A few repaired, rebound copies of the 2nd edition £30.00
L&L No. 15. Cuthbert. The Border Saint. 1994.
To celebrate ten years of the Liver and Lights series, I managed to wangle a retrospective exhibition at the Queens Hall Art Centre in my Hexham birthplace. The deal also involved my being in residence for two weeks, during which time I completed the 15th edition, an elaborately decorated reliquary, a painted, moulded box containing a letterpress printed book containing an epic poem about the life of St Cuthbert. Cuthbert is the patron saint of Borders, and in the poem I bring him back to life to oversee the break up of Yugoslavia, whose devastating civil war was horribly unfolding before our eyes in the daily news. At the launch, we performed a narrated musical version of the poem. Peter bently and I narrated with Harvey Eagles on Cello and my father on clarinet, the only time we ever performed together. It was an absolutely unforgettable performance, unfortunately lost….
The moulded hand painted papier mache box came in three editions, in a total edition of seventy copies. A few copies left £70.00
Liver & Lights No. 19. The Creek. (small and black cloth)
I was rooting about by the legendary Creek in Deptford and found thirty abandoned jewellery boxes. I took them home and made a book about the river to go in them. Each copy also contained other detritus ‘strand loped' from the shore…a bit of clay pipe and a bit of bone…..
I made a second edition a few years later that was a simple hardback edition of the book. It was a copy of this I gave to my esteemed Book Artist colleague Andi McGarry and which he thought contained tell of a mythical place. Imagine his amazement when, a few years hence he was commissioned to make a boat on the very spot where I had found the jewellery boxes….
Third edition rebound with additional illustrations £12.00
L&L No.22. The Naming. 1995
Commissioned by Stephanie Brown and Northern Arts for the exhibition Northern Rock Art at Durham art Gallery, the book is a meditation on the mysterious origins of the prehistoric Northumbrian rock carvings and the origins of language. The show contained examples of prehistoric cup and ring carvings and work by contemporary artists that somehow compounded their mystery, including work by Hamish Fulton, Richard Long and Andy Goldsworthy.I was resident artist in the show too, performing the piece with cellist Harvey Eagles at the opening.
£25.00
L&L No 25. Fife heroes (Book Monument) 1998.
The wonderful Babs McCool of Fife Arts somehow managed to acquire Scottish Arts Council funding for me to be Artist in Residence in Fife for a year, researching and exploring the people and culminating in the production of this book. After an initial cynical response from the literature people at Scottish Arts, we eventually were awarded the funding from a public sculpture fund, arguing that a book could be as much a monument as an equestrian statue…hence the title. I collected over a thousand stories from people all over Fife, wandering at will and interviewing hundreds of interesting people from old miners, to young muslims, selecting down to a hundred or so in the book, each illustrated by self drawn portraits and illustrations from the participants.
I asked each contributor a simple question: Is there a hero in your family? The responses form the core text of the book, the final selection being mainly from children as I found the adults either too guarded or too long or too self consciously literary. We launched the book in a disused shop in the new town of Cardenden, where I pasted all the stories and pictures to the walls to create a complete installation, but not before I had held open access workshops in other parts of the borough for people to come and add something, a drawing or a stamp, to each of the 2000 copies by hand.
Hardback only.. £15.00
Liver & Lights No 27. Concerning the peotry of Lost Things, Harrow Paperback
he second and most notorious of the three Liver and Lights Community projects. I was contacted by Harrow Arts and invited to apply for matching funding from the forthcoming Arts Council Year of The Artist Festival, which I was duly awarded. This enabled me to be Artist in Residence in Harrow for a year, to make another ‘book monument’. Local authority bureaucrats took predictable umbrage to the book not being direct replica of the Fife book, and duly banned it from being sold or stocked by Harrow’s libraries. I made the book by collecting dropped handwriting from Harrow’s streets and made what I thought was a vibrant document of suburban London at the turn of the Millennium. The council also took issue with a lot of what I found, particularly the use of the ’n’ word in a scrawled adolescent rap lyric…
As in the Fife book launch, I stuck all the handwriting I had found….literally bags of it…to the inside of a railway arch behind South Harrow tube station and invited people to come in and add something by hand to each of the books. In a final, definingly surreal moment, Harrow Arts offered me a list of minor celebrities to officially open the exhibition, including a famous, but dead, cricketer and Screaming Lords Sutch’s Mother, who was sadly unavailable. The lovely and game for anything retired agony aunt Claire Rayner seemed to be the only person on the list both alive and available and did a sterling job with a speech improvised on the spot by reading the back cover of the book almost word for word. I wish I’d filmed it….. £7.99
Liver & Lights No. 33. 20 Household objects..
To celebrate twenty years of Liver and Lights publications I drew the twenty most mundane objects in my house and celebrated them with a poem, containing the results in a little hardback laser printed book (the early editions came with handsome rubber stamp printed dustjacket. I like dustjackets, a dying practice I was seeking to revive!). There have been three editions to date, as the book seems to be quite popular….
£20.00
Liver & Lights No. 34. The Yellow Moon in Brockwell Park. Yellow Hardback ……..£20.00
L&L No.40. My Ancestors. 2008
I wrote a song about the peculiar and particular feeling of not-belonging sometimes experienced by second generation immigrants. In the song this becomes a yearning for the country of the narrators parents birth, The Scottish Highlands. I illustrated the song by painting 27 wooden panels. These became the contents of the accompanying book. Also contained in the book is a mini cd of a recording of the song sung by me and accompanied by my rudimentary guitar.
£15.00
L&L No.42. The afterrabbit. Sawbones c/w Kathys plums 2010. Ed 500Finally….we made a record….A vinyl 45 rpm single, contained in s screen printed fold out cover containing a tasty paperback book stuffed with lyrics, histories, biographies of the band, illustrations galore etc. We launched the book/ record with another legendary night at the Half Moon…which sadly was to be both best and the final Afterrabbit gig, ever. So we couldn't really promote the record and I have many copies under my bed…Its brilliant!! Come and get them! (the Morning Star reporter who reviewed it said he would have it on his desert island! )
Vinyl 45 rpm record and book £10.00
L&L No 44. English Rd Movies Vol. 1 Penge. 2010
I wanted do do my own low budget English road movies, not the glamorous American kind, down Route 66 past towns called San Bernadino and New Orleans on a greyhound bus but the more homespun English kind, on the number twelve from Piccadilly to Penge after a boozy night in Soho. A road movie so low budget, in fact, that its not a film at all but a little red book illustrated by rubber stamp prints. £12.00
L&L No.45. English Rd Movies Vol. 2. Bromley South. 2011
The second in. my series of low budget road movie books takes place on suburban train from Bromley South to Canterbury. Similarly illustrated and bound, this time in blue. The first two Road Movies are sold exclusively in the shop Circus in Brixton Village. The launch was the first ever performance of Bones and The Aft, when we played in the open air of the covered market in temperatures well below zero and my lips stuck to the Microphone. £12.00
L&L No 47. English Rd Movies Volume 3. Brixton. 2012
The third road movies book, a reminiscence of my first ever journey to South London, on a 159 bus two weeks after the Brixton riots…£12.00
L&L No 48. English Rd Movies Volume 4. Kings Cross. 2012
The fourth in the Road Movie series, this time an overnight coach journey from Glasgow to Kings Cross….. By now all four poems had become songs, regularly performed by Bones and the Aft.
I also made a special set of ten wooden slipcases to contain all four books, painted to resemble a No 12 London Routemaster bus. £12.00
Liver & Lights No 43. The People (Green Box containing 70 cards)…£25.00
This project started in a Rochester bookshop and grew and grew….I was looking at some thirties illustrated cigarette card portraits of cricketers and wondered at the skill of the artists and went home and had a go. A year later I had painted onto wood panels 137 portraits of people I knew. For each panel I also created a poem - portrait. I made them into a set of collectable cards and issued them as a box set as L&L No.43. For the launch at Le Garage Gallery at Herne Hill, Bones and the Aft created and performed a moving and memorable edited musical version, subsequently recorded and issued on the debut album L&L 49.The Ear. I wanted the work to be the record of a community, my community, of friends and acquaintances, to bring us together, to commemorate us. The collected portraits have been shown twice since, at the Book Art Bookshop tenth anniversary celebrations at the Red Gallery in Shoreditch and at Grennan Mill School during the Killkenny Arts Festival. I’m still occasionally adding to the portraits, fully intending to get to two hundred at least….This isn't Facebook, though, this is the antidote, because I really love all these people…!!
£30.00
Liver & Lights No 49.The Ear: Bones & the aft
(Green cloth CD and book) £10.00
Liver & Lights No 51. (2nd Edition printed on brown paper)
Geno….was my friend, colleague and inspiration at Art School. A rock and roll original who died suddenly this year after a twenty year battle with cancer. The book is a celebration of his life, his music and his peculiar originality. A hardback book hand printed with lots of woodblock like rubber stamp illuminations. 70 copies
£20.00
Liver & Lights No 52. Lord Biscuits Volvo 245 is Gone!...G
Lord Biscuit, fabled Bones drummer, woke up one morning to find his lovingly restored car had been nicked. This is the story of how he got it back; an adventure, a modern myth, a harangue against the thieving bastards who “leave us in daily fear of losing all our precious things” The book is printed entirely by hand using large six inch play foam cuts, similar to big rubber stamps, in white and red ink on black paper. It was a labour of love to match Lord Biscuits in restoring his car to its former glory. £25.00
Liver & Lights No. 53. Railton Road, Herne Hill End
I started writing a poem a day about stuff going on in my street, under my nose so to speak…this is a selection. The book is actually a small lidded box containing nine separate illustrated pamphlets, each one about a specific character or incident. Half way through the project my house was burgled…my laptop was nicked and I lost about thirty of the poems. I was strangely disheartened after this but then magically, I found a book -Miguel Street by VS Naipul - left on a nearby Railton Road wall. Each chapter in the book is a story about a separate character in the authors Miguel Street home, written in Port of Spain Trinidad during WW2. Naipul came from humble beginnings and eventually won the Nobel prize for literature and lives in nearby Stockwell! I took this as a sign that what I was doing, the observational, semi documentary nature of it,was worthwhile, despite the burglary and other discouragements, like my shrinking list of subscribers……………£25.00
Liver & Lights No. 54.The Rafter Habit. Bones and the Aft. Vinyl: £25.00
CD: £10.00
Liver & Lights No 55. You’ve been kind. Bonesandtheaft / bird radio collaboration.
Vinyl plus zine £15.00 CD plus zine £10.00
Songs from the Shandy Valley. Liver And Lights 1-9. Malice Aforethough Press
Texts and graphics from the first ten books.paperback £10.00
This is a paperback. Liver & Lights 10-22. Magpie Press
the L&L texts plus sheet music for their performance by Harvey Eagles £10.00
From Herne hill to the Plains of Penge. L&L texts and images compendium
30-54 Published by Book Art Book Shop. 2017 £10.00
