A Sanctuary

NEW WRITING & ARTWORK INSPIRED BY

VICTOR NEUBURG AND THE VINE PRESS

Of this edition no more than one hundred copies have been printed, this copy being number

Made thanks to the University of Sussex and with the blessings of the resurgent Vine Press.

SUSSEX. MMXXIV.

VICTOR BENJAMIN NEUBURG

Victor Benjamin Neuburg (18831940) is best known for two things: from 1907-1914, he was the magical, sexual and literary partner – and victim – of legendary occultist Aleister Crowley. In the 1930s, as an editor of poetry, he was the first to discover and publish Dylan Thomas. Yet his life offers so much more: reams of poetry, songs, collaborations with artists, musicians and other writers and a deep occult philosophy. In the 1920s he operated Vine Press, publishing books of poetry and prose. In the 1930s, he edited the Sunday Referee’s Poet’s Corner and then his own Comment magazine. He died young, in 1940, survived by his son Victor E. ‘Toby’ Neuburg – who would soon father his sole grandchild, Toby’s daughter Caroline Neuburg – and by his partner the enigmatic feminist writer Runia MacLeod.

DIY Counterculture

TEXT BY JUSTIN P. HOPPER

Between 1920 and 1930, the poet, publisher and celebrated occultist Victor Benjamin Neuburg lived in the small town of Steyning in West Sussex. Steyning was not a town previously noted for its leanings towards the literary or the countercultural, although for a few decades it would punch above its weight in both: the great poet William Butler Yeats lived there briefly at the end of his life, and wrote some of the greatest of his works in the town; the painter and influential gender-nonconformist Gluck was another of the town’s luminaries. But it was during Neuburg’s time there, operating his arguably unsuccessful Vine Press, that this connection perhaps most flourished.

I say arguably not because there was any doubt as to the financial or even literary status of Vine Press. It never made money, and while a few of its books should be considered lost classics of the 1920s counterculture, the same number have disappeared with little loss to the literary canon. No, the success of Vine Press was in creating a quixotic community from nothing – an act that, I’m convinced, Neuburg would’ve considered ‘magic’. He met wounded soldiers home from the First World War and imagined them as Ditchlingesque woodcut artists; a desperate mother, bringing her sickly child to Brighton’s sea air, and pictured her a heralded poet. He brought together young artists and ageing authors; utopians and early gay-rights activists; he put outcasts and anarchists and almost-aristocrats together in the mixing pot of his Vine Cottage home and created from it all a countercultural community in the conservative heart of chocolate-box England.

The writing and artwork in this publication attempts to celebrate Victor by doing the same. The work has been created and curated in response to an event in May 2024 entitled Printing a Pagan Bohemia in Sussex, held at the University of Sussex and assembled by the Centre for Modernist Studies and myself as their artistin-the-archive. All of the event’s presenters, and many of its attendees, have submitted writing or artwork for this publication; a kind of posthumous festschrift for the less-than-academic Victor.

Within you’ll find work about him and Vine Press, and work inspired by them; there is work by people who know nothing of his oeuvre yet reflect it in their passions. There are academic texts that will be cited by writers of the future, and poetry that works (purposefully) in the margins where literature, art and the other meet.

We in these pages are all vastly different people of vastly different backgrounds. Victor would appreciate that. I hope that we have pleased his reincarnated soul, wherever it may be, with our musings on and beside his own. And most importantly, that we have created new threads between people and ideas that will spawn their own creative micro-explosions, whatever that might be.

Justin Hopper is a writer working at the intersection of landscape, memory and myth. His book Obsolete Spells pursues the work of Victor Neuburg’s Vine Press. Other work includes the albums Chanctonbury Rings and The Path (Ghost Box Records) and the book The Old Weird Albion.

A trio of connected souls

TEXT BY CAROLINE NEUBURG

Inever met my grandfather, and yet I know him very well indeed. Better, perhaps, than many who knew him in his earthly incarnation as Victor Benjamin Neuburg. Vickybird, as he was called, Toby (my father, Victor E. Neuburg) and myself are closely connected by more than ties of blood. The ties that connect us are those of spirit, intellect and similarities of personality that bear on both the work I have done on my Grandfather, and on my own life.

How can I profess a relationship with a man I never met? Vickybird died in 1940, eight years before I was born, and yet my father told me more than once that I knew more about Vickybird than he did. This knowledge of my grandfather has come partly from research, from materials to which Vickybird’s only other biographer, Jean Overton Fuller, could never have benefitted. Then of course I had the benefit of my father’s input which was invaluable.

It is also true to say that throughout what has turned out to be a more than 40-year project researching his biography, Vickybird has been at my shoulder. He has constantly guided me, sometimes shifting my course but always putting me on what I am sure is the right path. Not once has he questioned my conclusions; more than once he has approved a choice or an idea. Always he has been mildly amused by the whole thing!

Toby was very much his father’s son. I am very much his granddaughter. We share many characteristics and ideas. All three of us were/ are very private people, all with a deep sense of being ‘outsiders’, an inexact description. Toby in

his memoir of his father, wrote about an ‘inner loneliness’ but this too, is inexact. Each of us, I think has/had a feeling of being ‘outside’ whatever context we might find ourselves in. Perhaps this is born of a reserve which protects the sense that revealing oneself to all is somehow dangerous and in the end not desirable. This leads, inevitably to difficulties in relationships of all kinds and to the word that Toby used of Vickybird: ‘disinvolved’. Self preservation perhaps... Maybe ‘selfcontained’ might sum this up. I found, reading some of my father Toby’s unpublished poetry, the following lines, which I think may make this clearer:

Coming and going is easy belonging more difficult

And I was never good at that.

Each of us had/has a sense of the existence and importance of ‘the other’ – the hidden world beyond the ordinary, which for some people becomes a belief in god and a religious purpose. None of us had/has that kind of belief. Vickybird actively pursued further knowledge of this, and came to some grief because of it; Toby did not, so far as I know, pursue any other knowledge, although he certainly had psychic ability, which I learned of as I grew older. I did pursue it for a while, though not consistently, and retain an interest and some psychic ability of which I have been aware for as long as I can recall. This came without any sense of it being odd – my experience has been one, generally, of enjoyable wonder.

Caroline Neuburg is the granddaughter of Victor B. Neuburg, his biographer, and heir to both his estate and the Vine Press. Her biography of the subject will soon be published by Vine Press.

Photo of Victor B. Neuburg, Sussex, 1920s, courtesy the estate of Victor Neuburg.

A trio of connected souls

My father believed strongly that he and I were ‘old souls’ in the way that Vickybird was, which is to say, we have/had lived lives before. It is something he talked about to me and therefore something I grew up being certain of and though I have not as many recollections as Vickybird, I have some. I suspect Toby did too, though I did not, alas, ask him about them – perhaps some things are just too personal. Toby could usually sense quickly who of those he met were ‘old’ or ‘new’ souls: my mother was a new one.

All of us too, were/are poets. The fact that my father wrote poetry is not well known, if known at all to any but a very few still living, but he did, and he and I, oddly, wrote in quite a similar style. I did not know his poetic work until I was well into my thirties. The discovery was both exciting and revelatory in ways I could not have imagined. To know a parent so intimately is a strange and amazing experience – not always comfortable.

At last, though, I have begun to re-read the poetry Toby left behind: a collection he called The Fractured Hour Glass as well as others, loose leaves of paper which speak to me, all these years on, inspiring me to write more of my own verse, and enabling me to mourn him properly. I found it impossible to talk about him for years after his death, now, as I come to realise more about him – for I know where his poetry came from and the mileposts it marks in his life and thought – I feel able to talk and to find a new voice.

Here are a few short pieces of my own that describe my relationship with my father.

Another Garden 2003

You smile at me from another garden in a distant, scarce remembered summer; there she sits before the table smiling into the distance of today, and you, from looking at the roses, turn to look at me.

There will be a radio playing in the kitchen and a kettle boiling for afternoon tea, while the cats lie in the shade, the summer heat beyond their humour. And there you are: among your roses, the willow shading the grass, smiling at me from another garden in another time and place...

Inscription 2010

I find your name in so many books, your name, a date, sometimes a place. And some pages are marked, their numbers on the flyleaf.

Often I understand the signposts to your thinking and follow them, seeing the road clearly, and finding you waiting for me.

Sometimes you leave me standing on a track that is indistinct and bunted by time and tears.

poems by Caroline Neuburg

The Sanctuary rebellion, freedom and Love in the heart of Sussex

PHOTOS & TEXT BY RACHEL POULTON

Nestled in the rolling hills of the South Downs, hidden amongst woodland and set away from main roads lies the site that was once the Sanctuary. Now known as the Longbury Hill estate and Sleepy Hollow, this warren of interconnecting country lanes in Washington near Storrington, West Sussex, was once a radical experiment in utopian living inhabited by freethinking, like-minded folk and for many, a place of freedom and refuge.

There are still traces of the settlement that stood here during the 1920s. As you wander through the trees from the National Trust car park at Warren Hill, clues that this was once a special place are found in the road names: Sanctuary Lane leads to Vera’s walk where there’s a simple shelter with wooden carvings and a bench for walkers to rest. It tells of the sanctuary this place once was.

The Sanctuary was a utopian community founded in 1923 by Vera Pragnell, the daughter of wealthy self-made textile manufacturer, Sir George Pragnell. By the 1920s, after the devastating losses, violence and horror of the First World War, many in British society were desperate for change and Vera Pragnell was one of them. An idealist and dreamer who had dedicated her teenage years to helping the poorest in society whilst working for several charitable organisations, Vera saw first-hand how modernity had benefitted the few at the expense of the many. She was shocked by the contrast of her comfortable life compared with those living in South London’s slums and vowed

to: ‘give as much as (she) gained.’ Having lost her father and brother to the Great War, she looked for a way to use her inheritance for the greater good. She searched for peace, salvation and the solitude needed to live life according Christ’s teachings; she sought to get away ‘from all the clutter of human life so that, unhampered and unattached, (she) could dig down to it; let the light in.’ And so, Vera chose to purchase about fifty acres of land in this isolated spot of Sussex, upon which she could live peacefully and share freely with others. A board in the shelter explains The Sanctuary’s origins and ambitions:

Originally, it was called The Sanctuary, a small settlement which grew up around a young girl who, believing that the Sermon on the Mount was practical politics and, in an effort to set her own house in order, gave away most of her money in the form of land to literally whomsoever asked for it. She felt that land –that most basic of necessities – should be freely owned by the people, hence at no time did she engage in monetary transactions concerning it.

Twelve plots were given to settlers to be used as they wished with no stipulations, rules or moral imperatives imposed. Her own house, Sanctuary Cottage, was kept open for wayfarers and wanderers in need of rest, regardless of background, class or creed. The community attracted alternative, radical thinkers: anarchists and communists; artists and poets; Christians, pagans, atheists and occultists. People seeking freedom and unconventional living found their place there and life was a delight:

Vera and her settlers liked a simple life close to nature. Spinning, weaving, sandal- making, tending goats, hens etc., and growing food … They made their own amusements, singing round a camp-fire, staging amateur theatrics, giving poetry readings, encouraging discussions on a wide range of subjects, camping on the downs, keeping open house to all and sundry and folk dancing on the ‘village green’.

The Sanctuary shares much of its philosophy with the Back to the Land movement to which social and aesthetic reformers, William Morris and John Ruskin were pivotal. Reacting against the rapid urban industrialisation, “pure materialism” and mass production of the Victorian age, this radical anti-capitalist movement advocated a return to the simple life, reducing material needs, engaging in traditional crafts and living in egalitarian communities.

Vera was inspired by the transformative ideas of many Back to the Land thinkers, in particular William Morris’ Arcadian visions and A.S. Neill’s philosophy of education that emphasised emotion, freedom and self-determination. Above all, she was guided by the ideology of writer, philosopher and poet, Edward Carpenter, and had hopes of a community based on his utopian socialism. Like Vera, Carpenter had used his inheritance and put his money where his mouth was. By the 1880s he had quit his lecturing job in order to establish a smallholding near Sheffield where he lived with his working-class lover and family in a self-sufficient, rural idyll. Together they cultivated a market garden and made leather sandals for sale. Carpenter, along with many revolutionary Socialists including Morris and Eleanor Marx, was a pioneering member of The Socialist League and a fin de siècle woke warrior - an early gay rights activist, sexual liberationist, prison reformist, environmentalist and animal rights advocate. During his later years, Carpenter visited The Sanctuary and was quite enamoured; although, living in a rudimentary hut, caravan, or old wheel-less London bus at his late stage of life was not for him. Sanctuary life was very basic with water being fetched from wells and no electricity. Settlers ate a limited vegetarian diet and, despite trying to live self-sufficiently, as Carpenter had done so successfully in his earlier life, they faced difficulties growing their own fruit and vegetables due to the poor soil and so, to get by, most sought work locally. Although

Sanctuary

there were hardships, life was free and joyous and the community lasted about ten years; surviving suspicions from outsiders and false scandals in the prudish press of nudity and debauchery.

Sadly, it was the settlers themselves that put an end to Vera’s peaceful pastoral vision. By 1932 many settlers wanted legal rights to their land and Vera became disillusioned, ‘Here as elsewhere once again Mammon had ousted God...What the world does with its freedom is always fascinating to watch – apparently we still prefer the mud to the difficulties of friendship with the stars.’ Most of the residents sold their land, profiting greatly from Vera’s kindness and generosity to which she conceded, ‘we have wandered too far from simple living and wise values and the vision of God...too long divorced from freedom and from the soil …’

Vera eventually gave the rest of the land away and, no longer true to its origins, the Sanctuary reverted to its original name of Longbury Hill. She gave a large portion of land to her husband Dennis who developed it into a small hamlet of houses, including Sleepy Hollow Hotel which Vera ran for a while. After the Second World War Londoners looking to escape the city bought the houses for large sums and the area became more and more what we see today: a sprawling private estate with gated houses and signs everywhere warning – Private Land! Keep Out! A far cry from the purpose with which a young girl, led by freedom, Love and care in her heart, envisioned this land.

Rachel Poulton is a photographer, writer and zinemaker whose series Unseen captures images and ideas of Sussex legend landscapes.

The Company He Kept:

Victor Neuburg and The Order of Woodcraft Chivalry

TEXT BY ANNABELLA POLLEN

Sandy Balls, a rural campsite near the village of Fordingbridge, Hampshire, has an antiquarian name that raises a chuckle; it regularly appears in roundups of curiouslytitled British places. Visitors to the present-day location, which offers large-scale catering and swimming facilities arranged picturesquely around sandy plateaus overlooking the Avon Valley, can partake in outdoor activities during relaxing family breaks in rented chalets. Deep in its woods, however, more intrepid explorers will find a fenced-off monument marking the grave of Ernest Westlake [1855-1922], purchaser of Sandy Balls in 1919, ancestor of the current owners, and founder of another curiously-titled organisation: the Order of Woodcraft Chivalry.

The Order (as current members call it) began as a splinter group from the Boy Scouts in 1916. Ernest, a geologist and anthropologist, and his doctor son Aubrey, were Quakers whose scouting interests was aligned more to the woodcraft inspirations of Ernest Thompson Seton, the British-born, US-based naturalist co-founder of the Boy Scouts of America, than the militaristic influence of battle veteran Robert BadenPowell. Amid the Great War, the Westlakes set up a pacifist alternative, foregrounding outdoor education and campfire mysticism. They began with groups of London boys and expanded to girls and adults of both sexes. Sandy Balls gave them the permanent location to scale up their ambitions for wholesale cultural regeneration. The Order offered a new way of life: radical, joyful, even ecstatic. It would be chivalric in its models, but also Dionysian. The Greek god brought subversion and liberation.

Ernest died in a car accident in 1922; his son became the Order’s Chieftain. Aubrey continued his father’s disregard for convention (Ernest was often spotted in the village dressed in toga and sandals, the uniform of the Simple Lifer). He developed the Order in new directions, beyond outdoor skills for children and Quaker principles of organisation, adding food reform, nature cure and experiments in human relationships. From 1923, the Order’s magazine, Pine Cone, brought its philosophies together, with a poem on the cover that encapsulated its world view:

They called me never;

But Dionysos came, Whence earth forever Is lighted by my flame.

The extract came from Songs of the Groves: Records of the Ancient World, published in 1921 by Vine Press, Steyning, and authored by Victor B. Neuburg. Its championing of nature worship and joyful living resonated deeply with Order members. Ernest had penned letters on similar topics in 1917, published posthumously in a 1927 pamphlet, The Place of Dionysos. Here, Aubrey listed Songs of the Groves among twenty-four books recommended for further reading. Amid works by Blake, Carpenter, Freud, Jung and Nietzsche, the six asterisked as ‘more important’ included Neuburg’s.

Image: ‘The Dawn Dance of Spring: Living Plastic by Members of the Order. Cameracraft by Bibi.’ Published in Pine Cone, April-June 1924. With kind permission of Pelican, Order of Woodcraft Chivalry.

The Company

He Kept

Pine Cone was initially edited by Harry Byngham, a journalist in natural health. His enthusiasm for Dionysos was so great that he changed his first name to Dion. In the second issue of Pine Cone, October 1923, he printed two untitled poems under the initials VBN. The first read:

We stript, and talking in the wood,

As far before in Plato’s time, We found anew how Good was good,

And how the world is one – a rime That keys to all the multitude.

Anew the bare skin on the grass,

The free hair twisting in the wind, Dark chilliads were forced to pass

Through the bright portals of the mind:

The swift world came, as pure as glass.

So we passed back to the old Hill,

And so re-learned the talking-trade, Till certain Voices, merry-shrill, Called us to toast and marmalade –

But the old time stayed with us still.

As a paean to the revitalising effects of nudity in nature, and its associated feeling of escape from the modern world, the verses reveal shared interests between Neuburg and Byngham. The latter was the co-founder of the first nudist

(‘gymnosophist’) club in Britain in 1924, a member of the British Society for Sex Psychology, which campaigned for liberal attitudes to open marriage and homosexuality, and a leader of the Men’s Dress Reform Society, where he wore primary-coloured medieval tunics and tights of his own design. Derek Edgell, author of the authoritative book on the Order, interviewed Byngham in the 1980s and detailed his friendship with Neuburg; he noted that the two talked of poetry and the occult, but it seems to me that they were also united by experiments in sexual liberation and dress (Neuburg too, was known for an archaic sartorial style). At the end of the 1920s, when Byngham lived in the Utopian community, The Sanctuary at Storrington, West Sussex – and where he caused press outrage as he hiked nude with his girlfriend across the South Downs – he was nearly Neuburg’s neighbour. From Sandy Balls to The Sanctuary, Byngham lived in a range of alternative communities, and he was a doyen of dozens of minority causes. He has appeared in all my studies of daring dreamers in interwar England. This was the company that Neuburg kept in the same years.

The Order of Woodcraft Chivalry had a niche back-to-nature offer which, in the 1920s, mixed in modernist poetry, experimental psychology and classical ritual. Neuburg’s Dionysian raptures suited its ambitions of festivity and freedom. For all the Order’s obscurity, it expanded Neuburg’s audiences significantly. While Vine Press publications were issued in print runs of c.500, Pine Cone was produced quarterly by the thousand. Annebella Pollen is Professor of Visual and Material Culture at the University of Brighton. Her books include The Kindred of the Kibbo Kift: Intellectual Barbarians and Nudism in a Cold Climate: The Visual Culture of Naturists in Mid-20th-Century Britain.

THE HISTORY OF RICHARD WHYTYNGDONE

artwork by Rachael Adams

Rachael is a multi-disciplinary artist, investigating spirit-of-place in the edges (geographically & psychologically). She works with paint, sound, print and screen and lives and works by the port in Newhaven.

Print Nostalgia: The Vine Press woodcuts and wood engravings

TEXT BY BETHAN STEVENS

images courtesy Vine Press and Estate of Victor Neuburg, unless otherwise noted

The wonderful wood cut and woodengraved illustrations in Vine Press publications show a critical nostalgia for earlier techniques and aesthetics. Wood cuts and wood engravings are relief printing technologies with long histories; they allowed woodblock illustrations to be printed letterpress alongside text set in type. To make both, you start with a smooth block of wood (which would print black when inked) and an artist cuts out the white parts of a design, leaving the black parts standing up in relief ready to be printed.

Unknown artist, wood engraving of vine motif, used in many Vine Press publications during the 1920s. Electrotype of woodblock (above) and finished print (below). Estate of Victor Neuburg.

The community at Vine Press mixed amateur and professional approaches throughout their visual and verbal work. Most illustrations discussed in this article are from the first publication, Lillygay (1920), which was illustrated by the self-taught brothers Eric and Percy West, local inhabitants of Steyning. However, the Vine Press also repeatedly used at least two far more detailed blocks, which have a different aesthetic and were clearly made by a professional. One of these is illustrated above: an engraving of a tree-like grape vine that features prominently on the press’s advertisements and

title pages, including Lillygay. Also illustrated is Victor Neuburg’s electrotype copy of the woodblock. Electrotypes were exact metal copies of an engraved wood block, made commercially using a chemical process. Electrotypes allowed publishers to print an image tens of thousands of times, causing no wear or damage to the original woodblock. If an electrotype wears out, you can simply have another one made from the block. We don’t know the exact origins of this particular print; presumably Neuburg commissioned it from a professional artist. It is evident that it was professionally engraved, because of how technically and stylistically different it is to the woodcuts that appear within the pages of the book. The print is minutely engraved, using extremely fine parallels and other marks that require great control; it deftly manages tone and contrast, and combines black- and white-line approaches (more on these below). Neuburg’s decision to have an electrotype made from this woodblock is curious, since it was possible to print thousands of copies direct from an engraved endgrain woodblock without damage. Making an electrotype suggests an ambition to print tens of thousands, perhaps speaking to ambitions for a greater commercial success than the Vine Press ever actually achieved (something that resonates with Justin Hopper’s account of the history of the press).

Having acquired a professional wood engraving, the team at Vine Press were not always able to print it effectively. I recently had the chance to examine a number of different impressions of this print, including in several Vine Press publications and flyers between 1920 and 1922. On the titlepage to Lillygay, the very first publication, the illustration

was very overprinted. Finely engraved details were smothered by ink, simply showing as solid black. In other publications the Vine Press team went to the opposite extreme, and this block was underprinted. But over the next couple of years, the team’s printing techniques improved. In Songs of the Groves (1921), the block was printed beautifully, and some copies were exquisitely hand coloured. I am grateful to Caroline Neuburg for telling me that most hand colouring at Vine Press was done by Kathleen Neuburg, who was married to Victor. Kathleen’s role as colourist is an example of nostalgic, historic print techniques. Hopper has commented that the Vine Press was a Blakean enterprise; the Neuburgs would probably have known that in the Blake family, Catherine Blake hand coloured many of William’s printed books. Indeed, more widely, up until the midnineteenth century (when colour printing started to become more commercially viable), it was usual for women to be employed to hand colour illustrations in luxury books.

Eric and Percy West, ‘Burd Ellen and Young Tamlane’, woodcut illustration in Lilligay (Vine Press, 1920), Woodblock and print. Estate of Victor Neuburg; William Blake, ‘Cradle Song’, from Songs of Innocence and of Experience, 1789-1794, hand-coloured relief etching, Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection, B1992.8.13V.

Within the pages of Lillygay, we can see the Wests were teaching themselves and didn’t have guidance from experienced printmakers. Some of the woodblocks for Lillygay are lower than type high, which would make them hard to print alongside text. The earliest (very striking) blocks don’t even use the whole of the woodblock, as we can see in ‘Burd Ellen’ (reproduced on the previous page). Treating the printing block as if it were a page, the Wests left a wide margin around their engraved design. All of the work cutting these invisible margins was wasted once it was printed on the white page. Anyone teaching you woodcutting or wood engraving will instruct you to use the whole block; in professional woodblocks that survive in museum collections, the edges of the printed image always hit the extreme edge of the block, to avoid such a waste of wood and labour. On investigating the Wests’ surviving woodblocks, it is fascinating to see such lessons being gradually learnt along the way.

One key technical and aesthetic choice in both woodcuts and wood engravings is between using predominantly black line or predominantly white line. White-line wood engraving was associated with Thomas Bewick’s late 18th-century prints (see for example https://www.britishmuseum.org/ collection/object/P_1882-0311-2910). White marks cut from the block by the artist directly form the image out of a black ground. This can be understood as an autographic approach: autographic because an individual artist can directly make these white lines with the cutting tool.

In contrast, in some historical periods there was a stronger fashion for black-line relief prints, sometimes made in facsimile of drawings. This approach dominated the Victorian period, for instance in the illustrations to Edward Lear’s nonsense books, or Lewis Carroll’s Alice novels. There are also many earlier examples, such as woodcuts made in the 15th and 16th centuries after artists including Albrecht Dürer and Hans Holbein. Black-line illustration often involved a more commercial and artisanal approach. To make the print you painstakingly cut out wood between and around the black lines. Such

prints were often made collaboratively, with a professional woodcutter doing the cutting for the designing artist.

It’s notable that in the early twentieth century, printmakers and private presses often rejected the black-line style, which they associated with old-fashioned Victorian engraving, in favour of striking white-line prints, which were praised in 1920s wood engraving manuals such as John Beedham’s. Artists such as Eric Ravilious, Eric Gill, and John and Paul Nash took up this approach, often supported by small presses such as the Golden Cockerel Press.

The strong modernist aesthetic of white-line prints makes it particularly striking that the Vine press went a totally different way, predominantly producing black-line illustrations – though the two processes often mix. In its particular blackline aesthetic, the Vine Press connected with different historical traditions, including the street literature of the 18th and 19th-centuries, blackline styles associated not only with collaborative Print Nostalgia

Eric Gill, ‘Jesus Driving the Moneychangers from the Temple’, 1919, Wood engraving, Yale Center for British Art, Gift of Judith and Norman A. Zlotsky, Yale BS 1953, B2000.1.6.

practices but often also with anonymous execution (rather than the cult of the artist and their individualised autographic mark).

Justin Hopper’s research on the Vine Press suggests it was a venture that particularly valued collective and anonymised art production, so it is illuminating to see this preference also showing through in the techniques of the woodcuts.

Eric and Percy West, ‘The Distracted Maid’, woodcut illustration in Lilligay (Vine Press, 1920), Private collection.

For instance Lillygay’s illustration to ‘The Distracted Maid’ offered a simple ship, which was a common figure in ballad illustrations, not only because it was a recurring motif in the poems themselves, but also because ships can be drawn with lots of straight simple lines, so are easy to cut. Both the anonymous artists of nineteenth-century ballads, and the self-taught West Brothers, benefit from the simplicity of the ship design. But there is also a striking modernity to the Vine Press illustration. The Wests take the thick framing black line often found round popular woodcuts of the past, and they exaggerate it, make it asymmetrical, and create a virtue of the imperfections of the wood grain which show through in the printing. For wonderful examples of historical ballad illustrations, see Broadside Ballads Online (http://ballads.bodleian.ox.ac.uk).

But my favourite print in Lillygay is the tiny haunting image of a woman at a cradle, illustrated above. Again there is a reference to an earlier artist, William Blake, whose ‘Cradle Song’ from Songs of Innocence is shown alongside. Blake’s unusually claustrophobic and heavy cradle is closely echoed by the Wests, and the dynamic

between the figures is similar. In hand-coloured copies, the Vine Press colouring is also Blakean (as with Blake’s Songs, the Vine Press occasionally used gold leaf, so that the crudeness of mock street literature meets luxury). Both illustrations are formally claustrophobic. In Blake’s, not only is the cradle overbearing, but the framing lines of the woman’s chair that enclose the scene, the heavy colouring, and the draped fabric. This claustrophobia is echoed in the West’s woodcut with a beautiful simplicity, achieved in the very heavy frame that circles the scene and is too large for it. The woman and crib look tiny, disappearing into a white framed vortex. There isn’t space here to discuss word-image relations, but I will just note that the first line of the accompanying poem tells us, ‘Burd Ellen sits in her bower windowe’. The reader would surely notice that anything less like a romantic bower window can hardly be imagined! Instead of a romantic space of feminine shelter and observation for Ellen (as ‘bower’ suggests), this hard oval resembles an optical device that both contains and shrinks the mother and child, distorting, and present them for our viewing. It’s an odd aesthetic created in the woodcut and emphasised in the page design, in which we seem to get sucked into the blankness of the unprinted page. Much of the affect is again created by the Vine Press’s marvellous book design with its phenomenal use of space. Again and again, these experimental publishers reinvented earlier print traditions in ways that make us look at the past differently.

Acknowledgements: This article has benefited from information on the Vine Press that was generously shared by Justin Hopper, Caroline Neuburg and Hope Wolf. My thanks to them all. All mistakes are my own.

Bethan Stevens is Reader in English & Art Writing at University of Sussex. Publications include the book The Wood Engravers’ Self-Portrait: The Dalziel Archive and Victorian Illustration, as well as many articles and chapters on wood engraving, printmakers, word-image relations and illustrated books and periodicals.

The Occult in Sussex: Chanctonbury Ring

TEXT BY LAURA KOUNINE

Doreen Valiente, the ‘mother of modern witchcraft’, in her book Where Witchcraft Lives (1962), wrote the following:

‘The traditional meeting-place of Sussex witches is Chanctonbury Ring. This is a high crest of the Downs crowned with a clump of beech trees which form a well-known landmark. They cover the site of what was once a Romano-British temple. A circular bank and ditch forms the actual Ring.’

‘Tradition says that if you go to the Ring at midnight, run three times round it, and invoke the Devil, he will appear. Alternatively, it is said that you must go there in the dark of the moon and walk seven times round the Ring when the Devil will come out of the wood and offer you a bowl of soup. This latter tradition sounds like a memory of the days when feasts were held there on the Great Sabbats.’

‘The traditions on Chanctonbury Ring date back to long before the time when local archaeologists found the remains of the pagan temple there. This shows how traditions about the witch cult do in fact link up with the old paganism.’

Valiente here is describing the well-known Sussex landmark near the village of Washington, about six miles north of Worthing. It is a large, isolated clump of trees, planted by Charles Goring in the 1760s, crowning one of the highest points of the Sussex Downs, visible for many miles around. As the folklorist Jacqueline Simpson states:

‘The term “Ring” is older than these trees, and refers to a small oval Iron Age hill fort, enclosing about three and a half acres, whose bank and ditch can still be traced, though the trees have overgrown the northern side of it. Nineteenth-century antiquarians were aware, from stray finds of tiles and tesserae, that there had been Roman occupation of the site; in 1909 men replanting the centre of the clump uncovered Roman masonry, and a brief excavation followed. This revealed a small building with a double-square plan – a common type of Romano-celtic temple – which seems to have been chiefly in use in the third and fourth centuries. Other Roman structures were found, but not identified…’

Chanctonbury Ring thus has a long and mysterious history as a sacred site. It was a sacred site to Victor Neuburg too. Victor Neuburg’s poem ‘Downwood’ celebrates this site for the occult memories that it holds:

It is evening, Night:

The tune

The winds sing Is an old rune

Of an old rite. Here,

In some long-dead year, They worshipped, little forgotten men, Forgotten things. Then Forgotten wings Fluttered.

They live today

In memory, Rising grey, Unuttered, From the eternal sea

Of man’s mind, Where everything dwells

That lived: blind Forces, Obsolete spells

It is of little surprise that Chanctonbury Ring was of such importance both to Victor Neuburg and Doreen Valiente. Ronald Hutton, in his majestic book on the history of modern pagan

witchcraft, confirms that by the 1960s it was generally recognized that the oldest coven in the county worked at Chanctonbury Ring. Doreen Valiente described this group as being of unusual antiquity, and the Ring as having been a meetingplace for covens long before the archaeological discoveries there.

Perhaps disappointingly for those who like to believe in such things, Jacqueline Simpson, the principal expert on Sussex folklore, disagrees. In Simpson’s study of the lore connected with the place, it was associated (light-heartedly) with the Devil by 1909, and with a Druid by the 1920s, but not with witches until the 1960s, when various different covens worked there.

Simpson tells of some of the stories and folktales associated with the site. One such account appeared in print in 1935:

‘Naturally the Ring is haunted. Even on a bright summer day there is an uncanny sense of an unseen presence, that seems to follow you about. If you enter the dark wood alone, you are conscious of something behind you. When you stop, It stops; when you go on, It follows. If you stand still and listen, even on the most tranquil day when no breath of air stirs the leaves, you can hear a whispering somewhere above you. No birds live in this sombre wood but a pair of yaffles, and occasionally the silence is broken by a loud, mocking laugh. Only once we have been so bold as to enter the Ring on a dark night. My wife and I went there alone. We shall never repeat the visit. Some things are best forgotten if they can be, and certainly not set down in a book.’

Yet, despite the uncanny attached to the Ring, Simpson argues: ‘That the Chanctonbury Devil is a dim memory of a Romano-Celtic god is an attractive hypothesis, but no more.’

Laura Kounine is a Senior Lecturer in Early Modern History at University of Sussex whose work focuses on witchcraft in Europe. Her forthcoming books include A History of Witches in their Own Words, based on oral-history interviews with witches, and the co-edited Cambridge Companion to the Witch.

BENEATH THE GREEN HILL

artwork by Robert Littleford

studied at the

Robert Littleford

Royal College of Art, he now lives in Brighton with his husband and their Parson Russell called River Phoenix. His work has appeared in many major international publications from the Wall Street Journal to National Geographic.

DOWNWOOD.

POETRY BY VICTOR B. NEUBURG

An Autumn Vesperal, the grey hues merging into Night and the distant sound of the Sea.

The Hills become blurred, a light Rain falls, and before the final Darkness there is a Vision of light low-browed men scudding amongst the gorse. Mingles with the dream of forgotten Races, there is a motif of Reminiscence and a Fireside.

Now evening sways

The boisterous sighing elms, And the wind overwhelms

The barren hilly ways.

It is sobriety of earth,

The call

Of old dim ways to birth :

The fall

Of leaves ; the nakedness of trees,

The breeze

Over the hills : an homily

Of the strong sea.

Swaying : swaying : swaying :

Dead leaves go and go,

Slow,

Slow blown by eddies of wind

Playing, playing,

Thinned, thinned,

Cold as a drift of snow

In an old barn at evening,

When fires are far,

And a single pale star

Shines, and a wing

Flutters in the hedge.

So darkness may bring

The world’s edge,

Blue fading to grey,

originally published in Songs of the Groves, Vine Press, 1921.

With a solitary raven

Over bare fields :

Away and away

To the haven

That yields

Warm love, warm

From the dull evening storm.

There are pools on the hills,

Fearsome in evening light :

A breeze thrills and thrills

Them at night.

The distance is white And grey.

It is a long way

Over to the sea.

Gulls fly over

From some pebbly cover

Sighingly ; suddenly.

And suddenly wheatears arise

From a chalky place :

Like a shot before the eyes

Like a flash before the face.

Who comes here must love lone

Places :

Where long-forgotten bone

Lies in the old spaces.

Death itself lives here.

The delicate panic fear

Is all around.

No sound

But is strange, out of time.

The ear

Never reaches to the rime ;

The eye

Sees the idea die.

It is evening,

Night :

The tune

The winds sing

Is an old rune

Of an old rite.

Here,

In some long-dead year,

They worshipped, little forgotten men,

Forgotten things.

Then

Forgotten wings

Fluttered.

They live today

In memory,

Rising grey,

Unuttered,

From the eternal sea

Of man’s mind,

Where everything dwells

That lived : blind Forces,

Obsolete spells,

Like mountainous horses

Bearing

Vast iron bells.

Flaring, flaring

The old lights are dim :

Staring

Over the great grey rim,

I go

To my desire

By the warm fire.

But I know

The dream was true.

And stars come through :

But still,

My cheek upon my hand,

Looking into the hearth-flame,

I stand

On the old hill,

Chill,

In a forgotten land

With an unknown name.

‘ A Forgotten Land / With an Unknown Name ’

The Place of Victor Neuburg

TEXT BY HOPE WOLF

Victor Neuburg’s poem ‘Downwood’ was first published by Vine Press in 1921. It reads like an incantation, as if the poet is attempting to bring into the present an ancient culture. Looking to the past for a kind of spiritual redemption, an alternative to a disenchanted world, he had much in common with many early twentieth-century modernists. However, his writing is rarely read and studied as part of their canon. This may in part be because, on first impressions, he seems to have been too attached to the place in which he wrote.

Compare ‘Downwood’ with American modernist Ezra Pound’s celebrated poem of 1912, ‘The Return’. Both are incantations, but the strange gods that Pound summons are unattached to any identifiable landscape or terrain. In ‘Downwood’, by contrast, Neuburg stands on an ‘old hill’, a place where ‘little forgotten men’ once performed their now ‘obsolete spells’. It is thought that he was here referring to Chanctonbury Ring.

It matters, though, that Neuburg does not actually name the Ring in his poem. He was no Hilaire Belloc. While he was similarly interested in Sussex and its traditions, he also looked inwards (to the psyche) and outwards (to the stars).

The complexity of Neuburg’s engagement with both place and time is most apparent where, in ‘Downwood’, he suggests that the old culture he is trying to access is not external to his being, but a part of it. Neuburg is summoning his past: in the ‘eternal sea/Of man’s mind […] everything dwells/That lived.’ It is possible, given his occult interests, that Neuburg was seeking to access his past lives, and particularly his premodern selves. Here, landscape was an aide: while modernity was inescapable in 1920s rural Sussex, Chanctonbury might well have been imagined as a kind of portal to a pre-industrial, pre-enlightenment age.

It is tempting to bring a psychoanalytic lens to his reflections. Was Neuburg, in ‘Downwood’, delving into his unconscious? On that ‘old hill’ he finds what reason has banished: he encounters wonders but also terrors. ‘Death itself lives here’, he writes. He seems to feel the pressure of ‘blind/Forces’: these could be passionate but also violent (‘blind’ is a word attached both to love and fury).

In the 1930s Neuburg published the writings of psychoanalyst Grace Pailthorpe and her partner Reuben Mednikoff. Both used poetry, as well as the visual arts, to explore their repressed fears and fantasies. Like Neuburg, they were also interested in the occult. Mednikoff believed that in a past life he was a tribal chief. It was an idea that helped him to understand why we could not easily bow to the will of others. Perhaps the ‘little forgotten men’ in ‘Downwood’ also played a part in Neuburg’s self-understanding. Were they an aspect of his psyche that modern civilisation had required him to expunge?

Illustration by Dennis West, from Victor B. Neuburg, Larkspur (Vine Press, 1922), courtesy of the Estate of Victor Neuburg

Neuburg’s reckoning with what most would prefer to forget was a risky undertaking. Reprieve was required, and in ‘Downwood’, the poet must draw away from the ‘world’s edge’ and return to the ‘warm fire’ of his home. However, he retains a memory of his travels. If Sussex provided him with portals, he ultimately journeyed to a place without a border. Poetry is its own place, as is the psyche. ‘Downwood’ ends with Neuburg standing ‘In a forgotten land/With an unknown name’.

Hope Wolf is Reader in Literature and Visual Culture at the University of Sussex and co-Director of the Centre for Modernist Studies. Her book Sussex Modernism is forthcoming from Yale University Press. As well as writing, she curates exhibitions, most recently A Tale of Mother’s Bones: Grace Pailthorpe, Reuben Mednikoff and the Birth of Psychorealism.

Performing Victor

TEXT BY JORDANA BELAICHE

BY GENEVIEVE OSILI

PHOTO

We’re not sure necromancy has ever been classed among the plethora of skills essential to the emerging theatre maker, but it’s one myself (as writer) and director, Beth Wilson, are attempting to learn in haste, in order to dramatise the story of Victor B. Neuburg for Thalia Arts theatre company. This reanimation comes off the back of existing work by Thalia Arts, created and run by Laura May Price (also a necromancer of Sussex bohemians) and Wilson, to bring hidden queer histories back to life.

It’s an unparalleled delight for a writer to witness characters spring from the page to stage. It’s another thing entirely to watch fictional conversations between people long since dead. It has been electric and immediately affecting, particularly in those moments where the cast and creative team feel like we’ve got the tone just right; that they could be in the room. For this writer in particular, it has been gratifying to witness audiences and cast members alike discover and love Vickybird through our work.

There’s never been a play focusing on Victor Neuburg performed before. Partly I suspect this has something to do with his relative obscurity and the fact that he tends to get overshadowed by the great skulking shadow of his former lover, Aleister Crowley. As we are discovering in making this work, it might also be because the scope of his story is vast in scale, both in terms of emotion and events.

Structuring the show has always been, and continues to be, a challenge. There’s a general rule with biographical shows: they tend to be more impactful if not restricted to putting events in chronological order. That’s the direction we’ve taken with Vicky’s story, which starts and ends in Vine Cottage with a brief interlude through the Algerian desert. Incessantly throughout the process we talk about the ‘play Victor’ and the ‘real Victor’, and where the twain should meet; and if the real Victor would approve of his onstage doppelgänger, despite us having no way of ever knowing. We discuss which parts of the story feel theatrically gratifying as they are, and which need to be modified. Artistic licence squares off with ancestral veneration.

However much our goal is to create a show that brings the dead back to life, that captures their spirit, honours their legacy in a way they might approve of or like, there is the overwhelming obstacle that ours is a medium designed for entertainment and every word must drive the plot. There are many elements we have yet to resolve dramatically – how to stage Thelemic magick in a way that is stimulating to those not on hard drugs, for example; or representing babies, deserts and 1920s printing presses on a shoestring budget.

As of May 2024, this production is still very much in development. We debuted material first at the Golden Goose in Peckham almost a year ago and again this spring. It was the initiatory step into staging the occult for a new, young, hungry audience. As it turned out, they were all very keen to discover that, however radical they thought their ideas about love, sexuality and polyamory were, there was a niche community of optimists dwelling in West Sussex in the 1920s who’d thought of it first – particularly at Vera Pragnell’s utopian community, The Sanctuary, which proved so integral for Neuburg’s Sussex years.

Beyond writing the dead into new theatrical life, the task of writing someone so proficient in the magic(k)al arts and ostrobogulously well-read has required enormous amounts of research. As I type these words, I stand at the precipice of a new draft. Our story about an obscure queer poet hiding in the recesses of Steyning, is really one of self-acceptance and of a man so unwaveringly generous – generosity being one of the traits he is most remembered for by nearly everyone who ever met him. It’s about overcoming abuse and choosing one’s own path.

We hope audiences will come away with a newfound understanding of Vickybird, his work and his immense capacity for love. We could all benefit from adopting a Neuburgian lens a little more often, as we hope our tale will tell.

Jordana Belaiche is an award-winning British-Algerian writer and performer based in London. She is currently working on rewrites of her play Vine Press with Thalia Arts Theatre Company in London.

From Chanctonbury to Fulking Escarpment and other poems

POETRY BY HARRIET ROSE

From Chanctonbury to Fulking Escarpment

Carried a heavy sack

Let the rain free him from his papery confines

And throw him into that bramble dip

Down to the last act

Without ceremony as was due,

No more than to say as dawn garnered light

That we walked here before and

Gently wore away at the path.

I cannot get into mind how far would be far enough

How weary legs can be made

In the hopes that the mind might follow

Then we spoke of dwellers under the hillock

At the very beginning

When I did not love to walk as I do now

And you would not find me so freely singing

I conjured that we had walked

And did so in dream of a view

Without mercy I laughed out loud at viscous fog

(Thronged with beasts)

Which served to obscure. And made you weep

And then I knew

What terror we find in the seeping,

In suppurating, in dying

Yet nature gifts us hollows, root nests and warrens

Find me not a coffin

But a sunken lane to lie in.

First Published in Snow Lit Rev No.11

FANCY THAT

, a path is cleared

That had not been before.

If I had died and walked on out

Then this was heaven’s door.

Trees triangulated in the sun, Their shadows blocked Like leaves of time.

Hedgerows to the wilderness

Our accidental shrine.

I came across a narrow bench

My journey being done,

The weald just then from where I stood

Was tantamount to none.

First Published in Snow Lit Rev No.11

STRIP PARTS ADJOINING FIELDS

Steep felted ramparts

Weft to tinted arms.

Mossy pelted creatures

Woven over months

October through winter.

Wyvern my descent

Tarnished newness on Soft felted carpets.

First Published in Snow Lit Rev No.11

Poetry by Harriet Rose

DEWPOND

High on a hill under heavy cover

We rest on a fallen branch for lunch

Not long after

Drop down to a deep dew bowl

Where the sudden warmth

Of a green fortress

Blesses

Here, a six-foot empress greets us

Her skin rustles past in one moment of Immense pressure

Bearing down upon pounds of wetness

This dip is barely six feet across In one step cleft from the pond

The rushes and stunted Blackthorn above

Forming myriad entrances

THE DREAM OF THE WOODEN CROSS or Julia the craftsman

The name means good maker “take two clay disks and carve them”

I went up to the wood

As the dream said

And found sticks which I bound with String, dummy sticks

A cross axis Held up against the light

Behind the forest floor

And ridge line The dead ash Pale sticks “take a pin and scratch the names in”

On a necklace A leafed man’s face

In brown glaze.

Exchange the gifts.

CHANNEL CURRENT

The wind comes in directly with full force off the channel what’s not stopped short by cliff face accelerates keenly over softer chalk slopes and hits hard on the ridgeway

A walker there follows where the ground drops off steeply ducking out of the wind She edges off the scarp Out of where the current keeps up Once descended treads the Cut gravel path of the disused railway line

A mile above buzzards dart

And the sun shines down directly

Harriet Rose is a writer and recent graduate in English Literature from the University of Sussex. Her poems have been published in Fatberg, Snow Lit Rev, and The Solitary Plover. In addition to writing prose, poetry, and criticism, Harriet is an amateur printer and publisher (Baldanders Press), fiddle player, and artist.

A Witch ’ s Response

Penned in the Margins of The Malleus Maleficarum

BY GRETCHEN HEFFERNAN

Poems written in the margins of the 15th-century book, the ‘hammer of witches’

Song of The Singing Species:

An Incantation

With this tongue I organize myself into place. A name inside a landscape familiar as bark touched smooth over a millennia of walks. We see ourselves among the great outlines and vistas, sing breasts from hills, chin, and knee ranges, hold still the palms of grasses opening the tides mouth, rise above the woodland, to a clouds crimson, the blood of an identity long remembered, in some vestibule, hidden deep in our own bodies water, reverberating in the throat of all voices.

Ashdown Forest

Lambs on the hillside and clouds like loam, pink rimed, the day ripened the yellow

petals of gorse, tiny tongues flicking against barbs. You took your needle and stitched me into the wilderness –crudely

I ask - where there’s a hole, let it spill light.

Let it spill, fire.

A Witch ’ s Response Penned in the Margins of The Malleus Maleficarum

Gret Heffernan is a writer who publishes and records text as art practice. She is the founder of Backlash Press and co-founder of Edgeland Modern. She is the author of The Sculptor, Dark Ansley 01, 02, Nobody, Nowhere, USA, and (forthcoming) Autobiography of a Drone.

IN LAMPLIT ROOMS

artwork by Vicky Waters

Vicky Waters loves the surfaces and objects found in older interiors, and nature’s returning grasp on human-made spaces (nature as a lover and a barbarian). She enjoys exploring the meeting point between memory and decay—extracting and constructing a story about a location.

Lancing to Bramber

POETRY BY ANGELA BACHINI

We watch the woman as she strides in,

Trailing a uniformed waiter behind her.

I sense them in this room, she states,

Holding a hand to her powdered forehead; Not seeing us, this group of women

Warming our living bodies by the fire.

At the end of our journey, for now.

Let’s say it began when the grids of houses

Gave way to green whispers and shadows, And needled by chill rain, downcast,

We lost that early exhilaration of escape, And clutched at our camaraderie,

Willing it to push us ever upwards;

No diversions could lead us off-track

Along primrose paths to Chanctonbury.

The devil must wait for sunshine.

Taking stock at the hard-won ridge, Solid golden privilege behind us,

Gauzed and darkened landscape before,

We leaned into a savage and unforgiving windIt held us, suffocated us,

Drowned us, gasping, in air.

Arms outstretched, motionless, we flew.

Breathless, a gathering, laughing.

But what was this? Oh, we said, oh, don’t cry.

We are all here together,

Here walk between us.

The valley will protect us.

And then we wound our slow way

Downwards, footsore, cold, triumphant,

To rest at this hotel preserved in shades of brown

And eat and drink among its ghosts.

Angela Bachini lives in Lewes and works at the University of Sussex; she’s also worked in archives, libraries and a castle. She can usually be found on the South Downs or reading a ghost story.

STILLED

woodcut and poetry by Keith

Pettit

Keith Pettit is a woodcut artist, sculptor and printmaker inspired by the landscapes and legends of his Sussex home. From tiny woodcuts to monumental sculpture, his work is a testament to the human relationship to place.

This Victor B. Neuburg poem was printed on the Albion Press, University of Sussex’s 19th-century hand-operated printing press, and is the first known use of an original Vine Press woodblock for at least 60 years.

Created by Justin Hopper, Hope Wolf and Stefan Musgrove, with very special thanks to Caroline Neuburg, Vine Press, the estate of Victor B. Neuburg and the University of Sussex.

Supported by funds from the School of Media, Arts and Humanities, as well as from the Arts & Humanities Research Council (AHRC) Impact Acceleration Account (IAA), at the University of Sussex.

Edited by Justin Hopper, 2024 ‘Artist in the Archives’ at University of Sussex Centre for Modernist Studies.

Front and back cover illustrations by Robert Littleford.

An ostrobogulous thank you to all of the contributors to A SANCTUARY: Rachael Adams, Angela Bachini, Jordana Belaiche, Gretchen Heffernan, Justin Hopper, Jolene Karman, Laura Kounine, Robert Littleford, Stefan Musgrove, Caroline Neuburg, Keith Pettit, Annabella Pollen, Rachel Poulton, Harriet Rose, Bethan Stevens, Hope Wolf.

For news on forthcoming publications from the resurgent Vine Press, follow @vine.press on Instagram (now!) or vinepress.co.uk (coming soon!).

Printed by youloveprint.co.uk/

Jolene Karman made this woodcut, among her first, Inspired by the DIY philosophy of Neuburg and Vine Press. Jolene is an artist and analogue photographer based in Sussex. Inspired by nature, history and folklore she aims to capture and share the magic and sense of wonder that she finds in the everyday.

Image Above