The love song of Miss Katie King

Presenting the latest volume from Derek Lamb at his
Officina Athelstane

The love song of Miss Katie King

Alan Loney

Illustrations by Melissa Mills
Published by Officina Athelstane, March 2025
163 x 227 mm
Hardback
48 pages

Begun in Auckland, New Zealand, around 1996 and completed some twenty years later in Melbourne, Australia, this work is one of a few experiments in constructing a text from the texts of others. The Love song of Miss Katie King is far more adventurous, in that it makes a story from the original that the original does not tell. The late nineteenth century saw many attempts at scientific explanations of so-called ‘spiritual’ phenomena, and in this one the very language of the scientific enquiry has yielded a story more amorous, more strange, and more unexpected than its originator could have imagined. The original from which this poem has been made is Researches in the Phenomena of Spiritualism, by William Crookes, with an Appendix by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, 1926.

The love song of Miss Katie King was printed on an Asbern ADR-1 cylinder press. The text is set in Typewriter Monotype 105, cast 12/14 pt at the foundry of The Printing Museum in Wellington, New Zealand. It is printed on Magnani Vergata Avorio 135 gsm and the endpapers are Colorplan Cobalt 125 gsm. The binding was completed in-house at in Iris Nachtblau uncoated book cloth in an edition of sixty-five copies.

Copies are $400 plus postage and can be obtained by contacting Derek Lamb directly at The Officina Athelstane.