So, Trillian_Stars and I have two new books out and this is the anniversary of when we first started thinking about them. So first I'll plug out books, which you can get at https://elizabethsiddal.com and then I'll tell you the weird story about how they happened.

We've published the only popular edition of the (mostly) complete works of Victorian poet Elizabeth Siddal and also This is Only Earth, My Dear, 48 photographs inspired by her poems: 

So how did all this happen?! — A year ago today, Trillian and I went to see the Rossetti exhibit at the Delaware Art Museum — it had previously come from the Tate and featured works by a number of the Rossetti's, but focusing on the poetry of Christina Rossetti, and the paintings of her brother, Dante Rossetti, and his wife, Elizabeth Siddal. And for most people, finding out that Elizabeth Siddal painted was news. 

The museum is wonderful. Nobody was there. There was snow outside. Both Trillian and I have always liked the Pre-Raphaelites so we had a lovely time. But we saw one thing there that puzzled me, it was a photograph and looking at it, I was pretty sure that the information on the tag was incorrect. (Being a photographer you know stuff about photos that other people don't.) So anyway, when we got home, I started doing some research into the photos and because of that, I read this biography of Dante Rossetti by his brother, William. And in that, I found this poem:  

and I was like Sweet barking cheese, this is an amazing poem — dim phantom's of an unknown ill?? So I went to buy a copy of her poems. But there isn't one. I found some scholarly critiques of them and a long out of print limited edition art book from 1978, but you couldn't go to the store and buy a book of her poems. So we started looking and found the others scattered across three biographies of her husband, Dante Rossetti. William writes there that he has a few more scraps, but that's everything she wrote that was actually a poem. So I copied them all down and made a little booklet of them for Trillian and I. 

And two other things happened at this same time. One was that we were headed to London in a month to cat sit and do absolutely nothing. The second was that I found out that in 2016, Swiss camera behemoth Hasselblad had put out a cell phone camera called the Hasselblad Moto and the reviews were scathing.  Everybody agreed that it was an absolute piece of garbage. So, Hasselblad making a cellphone camera is sort of like Ferarri making a shopping cart. 

Like a) you need a shopping cart but b) what the hell does Ferarri know about making a shopping cart? So anyway, these cameras came out in 2016 and immediately stopped being produced. So looking, I found that they were just littering eBay for like $20. So I bought one. And we took that camera and that booklet to England with us and we were staying right near where Elizabeth Siddal lived and died, so it was easy to read her poems and spend a lot of time thinking about her. And we found that while we kept reading these poems over and over and over and we were walking through  the neighborhood, the photos that we were taking were infused with the thoughts from those poems. 

And we started posting photos with snippets of her poems. 

And those posts started getting an enormous amount of attention. And we started to think that maybe this was bigger than just us being on vacation with a folded up bunch of poems from a woman who'd never lived to see them published. 

So ... yadda yadda yadda, we decided that getting our photos published was worth pursuing and we created a book that included eight of Elizabeth's poems and somewhere along the line we decided that we should also publish her poems as their own thing as a companion volume so people could read all of them. 

And a year later. They're here. 

They "officially" come out Spring 2025. You can pre-order on amazon or barns and noble. Or you can get them directly from ElizabethSiddal.com

Hope you're all doing well.