Club updates

Les mirabelles sont arrivées et elles ne restent que trois semaines.

Mirabelle plums are in and they last about three weeks, so August is mirabelles and nothing else. If you have never had one, they are worth the trip to France on their own.

This month's paper comes from a mill in Kochi prefecture that will stop production in March. The owner is 78 and there is no successor. This is not unusual — it is happening to most of them.

I bought what I could. August subscribers get the last of it, and I have written the mill's history on the card because in a year there will be no other record of it in English.

Le mois d'août est un pont suspendu qui tient réellement sous tension. Il a fallu neuf prototypes.

August is a suspension bridge that genuinely holds tension. It took nine prototypes and the ninth still fails about one time in twenty, so each one is tested before it goes in the envelope.

A subscriber asked whether it is right to work with found family photos. It is a fair question and I have thought about it a lot.

My rule: nothing identifiable goes out if there is any route back to a living person — no full names, no addresses, no recent material. Albums that arrive with names in them get the names cut out first, and those cuttings are destroyed rather than used.

We are reading for next year. Everything gets read, everything gets a reply, and contributors are paid £200 plus 30 copies.

What we are short of: anything that is not London, anything by people over 50, anything in a language other than English with a translation facing.

Open until 30 September.

People have been asking for three years whether these places share a world. They did not. As of August, they do.

Every map from here on fits an underlying continent, and I have redrawn the last eleven to agree with each other. Subscribers who have the originals will find the differences small but real — the coastline of Port Sennik moved about 4km.

Every envelope is hand-addressed to the child, and I have been getting some names wrong — particularly ones with characters my printer does not have.

There is now a field at signup for exactly how a name should be written, including in a non-Latin script if you want it that way. I will copy it by hand. Existing subscribers, reply and I will fix yours.

The printing shed floods most years and this year it flooded properly. We are relaying the floor and rebuilding two drying racks.

August parcels will go out around the 20th instead of the 5th. Everything is already printed — it is the drying that needs somewhere to happen.

Of the 47 stalls drawn since 2022, eleven have now closed. Three of them this year.

I have started asking permission to photograph as well as draw, and to record a short interview where the owner is willing. None of that goes in the mail — it goes to the National Archives, which have agreed to take the lot.

This month's theme is mushrooms and forest creatures — specifically the ones that appear after the first proper rain. Everything ships Thursday. If you subscribed in the last week you are in this batch.

A note: I have raised the international rate by $1 to cover postage, which went up again in June. Existing subscribers keep the old rate for a year.

I have had more than forty messages about Shiro since the July letter mentioned the limp. She is fine. The vet says it is arthritis, she is roughly fourteen, and she is on medication that the whole street now takes turns administering.

Thank you for asking. All of you. It is a strange and good thing that this many people in this many countries are worried about a cat in Yanaka.

After the brick, my local branch has asked that I bring anything over 500g to the counter rather than the box. This is fair.

The understanding is that I may continue, provided nothing is sharp, nothing is wet, and nothing is a brick. I have agreed to two of these three.

I have finally got hold of a metallic gold drum, which has been on the list for two years. August's print uses it against the standard black and it looks genuinely different in person — it catches the light as you tilt it, which is not something I can photograph.

Run is 140 this month.

A roller trolley cracked and the replacement is coming from a man in Ohio who only answers the phone on Tuesdays. August broadsides will ship in the first week of September instead.

Nobody will be charged for August until it actually ships. If you would rather skip the month entirely, reply and I will pause you.

Spring goes out on 1 September. It is the biggest one I have made — a 96-page long-stitch notebook, twelve envelopes in two sizes, a sheet of blotting paper, and a glass dip pen from a maker in Launceston.

Price stays the same. The dip pen was a trade: she wanted notebooks.

From September this stops being only my own work. I have four poets lined up for the rest of the year, three writing in Malayalam and one in Tamil, all printed with facing translations.

They are paid ₹5,000 per sheet plus twenty copies. If that sounds low for a poem, it is roughly what a literary magazine here pays for twenty.

The most common message I get is that €11 a month is more than someone wants to spend on prompts.

So from September there is a cards-only tier at €6 — thirty prompt cards, no inserts, no ephemera, same letter. It goes in a normal envelope, which is most of the saving.

This month is everything that accumulates in a glovebox over a decade. Old parking stubs, a cassette adapter, four ketchup packets, an insurance card from two cars ago.

Shipping Monday. International subscribers, USPS has been slow to Europe — allow an extra week.

Every remaining month of 2026 is spoken for. I print about 100 and there are 118 subscribers, so I have closed it rather than print more than the press run I can do properly in a week.

There is a list for 2027. It is not short.

July went out four days late — I underestimated how long forty-one original paintings actually takes. They are all in the post now. Thank you for the patience.