I am happy to announce the Spring 2016 Informational Pamphlet is done and already in the mail to many of you.

Lavender and Evil Things takes a look at physic gardens – the forerunners of western botanical gardens – which provided medieval doctors and medical students their remedies. Information gathered in the physic garden was gathered in illustrated reference books called herbals. Herbals helped inform the development of botany as a science.

Also considered is the herbalism in the contemporary world, and outside the Western tradition. Included is advice on plants from Hildegarde of Bingen, German abbess and superstar polymath.

Printed in an edition of 200 from woodblocks and handset metal type. Individual copies are now available for purchase, if you so desire, here and here. And there are also still subscriptions available for the entire year’s worth of 2016 pamphlets, if you meant to subscribe but forgot. I still send pamphlets out hither and yonder to a wide variety of unsuspecting recipients, so watch your mailbox, you might get a surprise.

This year’s pamphlets will all be loosely organized around the botanical world, in order to keep my research process relatively sane. Coming up later this summer I’m happy to announce that I’ll be producing the summer pamphlet at Columbia College Chicago’s Center for Book, Paper, and Print, where I’ll be in residence for two weeks. So exciting!

As always, thank you for reading.