Well hello again Quill friends, and welcome to 2012! I hope you all had a great holiday and enjoyed the copious amount of food we are wont to eat this time of year. As you can already tell from the numerous tweets I have been producing lately, I am back on the job and ready for 2012! I have to say, the internet was an awfully eerie place without all of you to talk to.

But now that we are here, I suppose you all want to know what exactly is going to be going on this year. Well, I am happy to tell you that we have a great number of things in the works here at the Quill.

To start, you only need to look on our homepage to see all the exciting new books we have coming out this spring. But I’m afraid I’m going to blow your mind, because there’s more. I have been working diligently, updating the website for our serial publication, The Devil’s Artisan. If you’ve never heard of it, I encourage you to check it out. The Devil’s Artisan is an excellent resource for anyone interested in the book arts. Past issues have featured Canadian publishing giants such as Frank Newfeld, Jim Rimmer, and Carl Dair. If you are interested in publishing in Canada, The Devil’s Artisan is an excellent link to our rich typographical history. To make our past issues a little more accessible, I’ve been adding share buttons to all the pages. And, hold onto your hats kids, there just might be a new contest coming your way soon featuring those fancy new buttons.

The most recent issue of The Devil's Artisan features an essay by Seth called 'Creating a Personal Vernacular Design Style'.

Also on our DA pages I’ve been updating our dingbats. Dingbats typographical devices used to signal a division in the text. Tim and Elke Inkster have a wide variety of dingbats available for publication in their books and over the years they have slowly been putting them online so that you can use them too. They are all available for free download. If you look through the pages of our books, you actually might recognize some. For example, these below were both in Sailor Girl:

The porthole was used for part divisions ...

... and the steamer was used with the epigraph.

The acquisition of these dingbats is a bit of a funny story, and can be read in full at the bottom of any of the dingbat pages. Put shortly, Tim and Elke stumbled upon them when they were walking through the Erin countryside. The dingbats were in nineteenth-century books, and the nineteenth-century books were in boxes, and the boxes (boxes and boxes and boxes) were in the stone foundation of a ruined barn. The dingbats have since been cut out of the pages and archived. It has been my job lately to continue adding them to the website.

Most recently I’ve added a series of eccentric images on our “Miscellany” page. There are a lot of odd ones in there, and I had a great deal of fun putting them up. Inspired by these wonky images, I’ve decided to try my hand at making some wonky greeting cards. Perhaps, if my attempts inspire you too, you guys can give it a go as well. So far my favourite funky image is this rather sad looking goat, but there are many more great ones to check out too!

This goofy goat is one of my favourite dingbats.

And as if that wasn’t enough, we do have one more itsy, bitsy, tiny bit of excitement left to share with you. We are going to start running a series of feminist reviews of our books here on this blog. It turns out that the market for Little Comrades—written by a debut author, already in her eighties—is almost entirely young Canadian women. However, when you look at the content it makes sense. Little Comrades tells the story of a young woman growing up and learning how to assert herself as a woman—learning whether, in an androcentric world, women can even assert themselves at all. I think you will be happy with the what she discovers. Little Comrades, paired with Sailor Girl, will be the feature of the first review.

Little Comrades inspired me to start writing a series of feminist reviews of PQL books.

There are many things to look forward to in the months ahead. Watch this space for contests, designer cards, and feminist reviews (my three favourite things)! Until next time … Porcupette out!