Siddhartha

Hermann Hesse

2017

Full green calfskin reverse offset printed with a closeup photograph of water in a stream I was crossing in Devon during the summer. The spine is covered in hand dyed grey calfskin and the title is hand lettered with holographic foil. The Swarovski crystals in Moonlight and Topaz and the flat cut pearls are inlaid into the leather.

This was a commission from the internationally renowned lighting installation artist, Bruce Munro. ‘Siddhartha’ had been a huge influence on his work, especially “Ferryman’s Crossing” where text from the book is represented by reflective metallic discs arranged so that they can be read as Morse code.

The design reflects Munro’s installation but the choice of materials is found in another passage: “Tenderly, he looked into the rushing water, into the transparent green...With a thousand eyes, the river looked at him, with green ones, with white ones, with crystal ones, with sky blue ones.” The doublures are of hand dyed grey calfskin with Japanese tissue onlays that have been coloured with silver acrylic and rollered over with lino ink. The songbirds are backpared onlays of green calf, black goat and metallic turquose leathers with holographic tooling. The endpapers are an image of moss on a riverbank on the Longleat estate nearby.

Also pictured is a different binding of the same book. Full green straight grain Morocco goatskin with hand tooled 23c gold tooling and title. Endpapers are a detail from the Lotus Gate, City Palace, Jaipur.