The Reading Room Press

PORTENTOUS PORTALS

The lintel above the front door of T. E. Lawrence’s cottage at Clouds Hill is well known:

It didn’t take much for me, as a Lawrence enthusiast, to ask Richard Healy of the Right Hand Press to cut the same inscription in the oak beam above the door to the Reading Room Press and this he did in 2010.

It had been my idea, inspired by Fergus Wessel’s work on the quoin-stones of the Whittington Press, to do something with the stone to the left of the door. Rory Young, that estimable stone-cutter and sculptor, for long had generously agreed to help. On a wet morning in June 2019 he came:

For a humble portal it’s lucky to have had the attentions of such craftsmen.