Mark Pawson took part in Small Publishers Fair twenty one times. His stall at the fair was a magnet for many. His council flat his print shop, warehouse and archive.
When Mark died in March 2025, Sarah Bodman invited book artist friends to send in words or images to express their thoughts about him for the April 2025 edition of Bristol’s Centre for Print Research’s Book Arts Newsletter.
The front cover of the edition featured an image made by Bodman herself. It’s a photograph of Mark at Small Publishers Fair 2024 with a frame made up of images and ephemera by Mark.
Writer, publisher and the subject of the 2025 exhibition, Erica Van Horn, wrote this for the edition:
“In September 1999, Mark Pawson had two hundred file boxes produced. He signed the inside lid. The box in front of me is No.36/200. The outside of the box, both top and bottom, was printed in brown ink with small explosions announcing NO NEW WORK, as well as a facsimile of his signature, in a long diagonal, along with a linear list of things that he made: BADGES, BOOKS, COLLAGES, ENAMEL PLAQUES, MAILART, POSTCARDS, PRINTS, RUBBERSTAMPS, STICKERS, T-SHIRTS & ASSORTED EPHEMERA……
We are all well aware that NO NEW WORK did not succeed as a way of life. Mark made a lot more of everything in the years since 1999, and we have a useful box in which to store his productions.
From 1993 to 1998, when Simon and I made the book shop workfortheeyetodo as a Coracle project, re-located from Narrow Street to Hanbury Street in London, Mark stopped in once a week. Sometimes he was delivering his newest books. Other times he was just in the neighbourhood and, always curious, he spent time looking at any fresh publications that had arrived since his last visit. One day we had a conversation about a project he was hoping to do, but he was struggling to arrive at exactly the right mode of production. We discussed the problem and together we solved it. He thanked us and then he reprimanded us and said that we should not give away our sources for such a specific means of production. Simon responded by asserting that information should always be shared. He said, ‘Anyway, it helps us all to share resources because in doing so we are helping to keep the producers, printers, rubber stamp makers, and print finishers in business. If we do not support them they will close down and then we will all be in trouble.’
Over the last thirty years Simon and I did a huge number of book-making workshops. We also made numerous talks and presentations about Coracle books, and about producing and publishing books in general. We never did a presentation without mentioning Mark Pawson. We found it especially important to tell young students how Mark got a job at a photocopy shop early in his life as an artist. He made use of the times when the shop was not busy to discreetly run off his own work on the machines. He was always on the look out for materials, and at one point he was given a large quantity of billboard paper, where the large dot screen was crazily out of scale when viewed close-up. He overprinted these pages with photocopying in the making of multiple books. Mark did not turn to established printers for his solutions. He worked at home and in keeping his production both simple and laboriously time-consuming, he produced what he made with his own skills in his own space and in his own time. Making things was what he did and he was never happier than when he was doing just that. Farming out his projects and paying for someone else to make them would defeat the whole process for him. Stamps and printings over the years carried the legend: Printed at Home in London, Handmade in Portsmouth, Gocco Printed in My Living Room, etc
Making a book out of used paper bags (re-using is recycling), documenting the workings of the British fused plug, as well his endlessly reprinted celebration of the Kinder Egg, Mark paid careful attention to the small things in the world around him and he made each of us complicit in his process.”
Erica Van Horn, Coracle, 13 March 2025, Tipperary
Read the full series of Book Arts Newsletter tributes to Mark here, pages 68 to 71.
Mark’s website is here.
Special event
Small Publishers Fair 2025 will celebrate and remember Mark Pawson with the below event on the Friday of the Fair.
Badge Making, in the Green Room (on stage)
Friday 24 October, 5.30pm—7.00pm
Mark’s friend, artist and printmaker Christina Lamb, will lead a badge-making session in Mark’s name. All welcome.
