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"Longer ago than most people can remember, and in a place just out of sight from here, a man about your father's age spent a snowy, snivvly night hiding from the mountain wind outside the gates of a prosperous walled town...."

In time Cherce shares the secret with his ward, a lad named Found ("because he was") and with Dovely. She is the only daughter of Oraxion the chief bureaucrat in this stodgy market town, the cradle of retail, where adults positively adore commerce, cherish conformity, and worship money. Yet the daring youngsters Found and Dovely march and skip to their own drummers; they unloose a daisychain of events that lead to disaster, plunging the mercantile mountain into a perilous, $tupendous, hy$terical CRI$I$!

The tale is told by a blacksmith of author Dana Phillips's own childhood, an artisan of the early twentieth century. The Blacksmith's voice frames the entire story, which is an adventurous, allegorical, satiric, funny, sometimes scary, once very sad, word-twisting, pun-stumping, type-tumbling yarn. Warning: It takes place in a different time, nay a different world than our own, or so it appears. Even the illustrations by the distinguished illuminator Sheila Waters—inspired by illuminations found in antique books—are time-out-of-mind. Ditto Julian Waters' intriguing graphic design and beautiful calligraphy.

Taken all together, here is a fable that will take parents and grandparents back to the "chapter books" of your childhood. Here is a story that will transport today's child of any age into that captivating realm of fantasy, morality, adventure and imagination.

English-born Julian Waters, regarded by many cognoscenti as the finest calligrapher working in America today, studied with his parents, Sheila and Peter (founder of the Library of Congress Conservation Lab) and with the German designer Hermann Zapf. Himself now a teacher in many venues in America and abroad, he became Zapf's successor at Rochester Polytechnic Institute. His memorable commissions include advising Maya Lin on the Vietnam Memorial and designing lettering for postage stamps such as the "LOVE" stamp.

Unique in its particulars, The Blacksmith's Tale... was designed, typeset and printed with an attention to detail and quality rarely seen these days. For example, it uses the ligatures of yore: paired letters such as æ, fi,fl, etc. appear in single characters. Likewise, the book includes special typography—"type tricks" in which words and letters are laid out to reflect action or mood. Buffered paper was used to assure longevity of the Smyth-sewn volume and the leaves were bound "grain right" (parallel to the spine) so the book can lie open.