A small note from the bindery on what the Press is, what it intends, and what it does not.
The Tale of Rat Queen.
Rat Queen is the work of a small press lately convened, given over to the revival of forgotten Victorian illustration through objects one may hold in the hand and put to use. The Press began with a single book: Walter Crane's A Floral Fantasy in an Old English Garden, published 1899, in which every wildflower wears heraldry and walks the path of a chapter. The book is now in the commons; the Press believed it deserved another life, not as a facsimile to sit upon the shelf but as a working object, shuffled and dealt at a table.
The Press keeps a small room in Tijuana, between the desert and the sea, and binds the work there by hand. The Press takes its name from a small marginal figure that recurs in late-Victorian printers' devices: a rat in a paper crown, watching the work go by. The Press considers her a patron saint; she approves, we like to think, of careful reproduction, and she has the patience for it.
Revival, not pastiche.
The Press does not invent Victorian-looking ornaments where the Victorians made their own; it sets Crane's plates beside his own borders and lets the original speak. The brief is short: one book at a time, hand-numbered, printed by methods the original illustrators would have recognised, and then set aside. The Press would rather make one good thing in a year than ten passable ones in a month.
What the Buyer Receives.
A playable pack of fifty-two cards, drawn from Crane's garden, hand-numbered to three hundred Decks. A piece of the late-Victorian floral imagination, reissued in a form one can shuffle. The Press hopes the Deck reaches tables where it is shuffled often, and that it carries Crane back into rooms where he has not been seen in a hundred years.
Here is the work. It is the Press's first issue, and at present its only one.
See the Deck