A Paper Snowstorm
Toni Savage & the Leicester Broadsheets

by Rigby Graham and Derek Deadman

Rigby Graham, whose drew this evocative sketch of Toni Savage, describes Toni's broadsheet production as a 'paper snowstorm' -- his rate of production only matched by his inventiveness and sheer sense of fun. A former opera singer, and a folk-club enthusiast, Savage was at the heart of a revival of broadsheet printing in Leicester in the early 1960s. Transfixed by the creative possiblities of letterpress printing, he and his friends produced hundreds of letterpress-printed broadsheets and pamphlets for free distributionto friends and strangers alike in the clubs and strees of Leicestershire. Toni's story is a story of the energies and enthusiasims of the sixties, but it is also a case study in the transformation of letterpress printing from its commercial hegemony to its role as a tool of the artist/craftsman that it holds today.

This book relates Toni's story through the fond and frequently funny recollections of his contemporaries: Alan Brignull, Duine Campbell, Rigby Graham & Cynthia Savage, using tipped-in facsimiles of the broadsheets they produced as illustration. But it is also a scholarly record of the period, including a complete list of all the broadsheets issued with Leicestershire imprints to the end of 2004, meticulously researched and compiled by Derek Deadman. There are seventy-three pages, illustrated with more than 35 facsimiles tipped onto the pages, as well as woodcuts, engravings, line drawings and photographs of the printers at work. In a folder within the book's slipcase are ten original Leicester Broadsheets: five Phoenix Broadsheets from the press of Toni Savage and at least one each from Alan Brignull, Derek Deadman, Hans van Eijk, Rigby Graham and Cynthia Savage.

Printed from metal type with a Victoria Platen Press, the text is set in Bembo on Magnani mould-made paper and bound in the workshop of Stephen Conway. An edition of 200, the book is 14 x 10 inches, printed paper over boards with a cloth spine and comes in a patterned paper and cloth slipcase.

On the left: Paper Snowstorm with its slipcase and portfolio.

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