Meet Mr Fox

Fantastic Mr Fox Letterpress Plate

“The place I am hoping to get to is so marvellous that if I described it to you now you would go crazy with excitement.”Mr Fox, p38, Fantastic Mr Fox.
 
I’d like to introduce you to my good friend, the one, the only, fantastic Mr Fox!

My Mr Fox is a little relief printing plate of a beautiful fox illustration and has been part of my life since I was about eight years old. Given to me by my dad and carefully kept in my treasure box to be gazed upon, lovingly stroked and shown only to people I considered worthy. He was my very own curiosity in both senses of the word. A rare object which I had discovered.
 
Adventure, discovery, experiments and exploration played a big part in my life growing up. Together with my sisters we would adventure around the countryside making dens, climbing trees, discovering new worlds. But one of the best places to make discoveries was in the workshop at the bottom of the garden. As Mr Fox says in the quote, the place really was so marvellous (to me anyway), and I vividly remember the day when me and my sister discovered what we thought was a drawer full of purest gold! We really did go crazy with excitement, and were positively buzzing until our dad told us it was a special metallic powder (called bronzing powder) and was a traditional method of making inks look shiny and metallic – this was after we had covered our hands and faces with it and were told to wash it off immediately – oh dear!
 
It was on one these exploratory adventures that I discovered my Mr Fox, mysteriously encased in a folded piece of card alongside Father Christmas who appeared to be his companion while in storage. I remember being thrilled to bits with my discovery and when I showed my dad what I had found he said that I could keep them both. They were carefully placed in my treasure box, but it was Mr Fox that had really captured my imagination. He stayed there in the box for many, many years and it wasn’t until I grew up and began operating the printing presses myself that I began to think of him. Printing him for the first time alongside my dad was an absolute delight and I’m so pleased that he has become the foundation for Osity’s next stationery collection, CuriOsity.
 
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