The Path Through the Trees (1979) by Christopher Milne

Author:Christopher Milne [Milne, Christopher]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, Literary Figures
ISBN: 9781447269861
Google: 0tHgAwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Pan Macmillan
Published: 2014-06-18T21:00:00+00:00

FRAMING

A single incident, happening out of the blue, starts one off on a new course. It was Miss Channing and her Swiss flowers who had introduced us to greetings cards. It was Harold Finlinson who now introduced us to old prints and thence to picture framing. If Miss Channing had never written her letter, if Finlinson, visiting Dartmouth, had called elsewhere, or if in either case I had said ‘No’ instead of ‘Yes’, would the fortunes of the Harbour Bookshop have been very different?

They were small steel engravings and they had come from topographical books published in the early nineteenth century. In their original state they had been black-and-white, and perhaps over the years they had become blotched with brown. But this didn’t matter. They were torn out, bleached, washed, sized (to make the paper non-absorbent), tinted with watercolours and then mounted. This was how Finlinson offered them to us, and since they were all of South Devon scenes and many of them were of Dartmouth itself and since they were modestly priced at 3/– to 5/–, I was able to assure him very quickly that he had come to the right place.

Dartmouth in the 1830s was not so very different from Dartmouth in the 1950s. The Butterwalk, Bayard’s Cove, Dartmouth Castle, the views up and down the river: these had changed little in those hundred-odd years. This gave the prints an added charm: they showed not just what had been but what very recognizably still was. We put them on display and were delighted to find that our customers shared our enthusiasm. And at once the question arose: what about frames? I asked Finlinson and he recommended a black-and-gold Hogarth moulding and suggested that I arranged this with a local framer. So I went to Skinner.

I had discovered Skinner the previous year, for I was already thinking of framed pictures as a possible addition to our books. One or two of our greetings card suppliers also sold prints and it seemed natural that we should, too. There was a framer in Dartmouth but he was unwilling to help us; so I had to go further afield. Skinner was in Torquay and this meant catching first a boat, then a train, then a bus. But the bus landed me almost at his door, and then came half an hour with just the sort of man whose company I so specially enjoyed – that of an elderly, Devonian craftsman – and after I had shown him my prints (they were mostly pictures of sailing ships and coastal scenes) and discussed mounts and mouldings, I could listen to his stories and laugh at his jokes and store them up for passing on to Lesley when I got home.

So now I took him my old engravings. But, alas, he could offer me only narrow oak or plain black; he didn’t have Hogarth. It was too expensive, he said.

In the end, therefore – for there seemed no alternative – I became my own picture framer.

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