The only thing I really "collect" (meaning that I'll go into a shop and seek them out, irrespective of my immediate desires) are paperbacks from The Arden Shakespeare. The books have nice sewn bindings and are of uniform size (editions from the totally revised third series still have the same dimensions as the second series), the font is readable, the editorial practices are neither conservative nor revisionist, and the copious footnotes (most pages have more notes than dialogue) discuss relevant interpretive controversies. But mostly I collect them for the covers—the pairing of image and text is often abstract, and almost uniformly shocking.

I chanced to read this on the back of Othello:

The illustration on the cover is by Peter Blake, a member of the Brotherhood of Ruralists, a group of seven artists who have a passionate concern for English artistic skills and craftsmanship, and who see their work as the celebration of a vital tradition in English art, and its ultimate source, the spirit of the countryside.

I was doubly amazed to read (on the computer) that this phase of Blake's career came after his success as a pop artist and his work on Sgt. Pepper's. In 1969, he and his family moved from London to a village outside of Bath, where he worked primarily in watercolors.

This is a common enough 60s narrative—from urbal to rural; from groundless individualism to traditional community; from mass media to folk craft (it dawns on you that the destruction of cultural norms, however advanced it may seem in an artwork, is the same technology-driven capitalist ideology that justifies destroying the earth)—but somehow I've come to expect the story of the artist making the move from the traditional to the experimental, not the reverse.

Blake announced the formation of the Brotherhood of Ruralists on the spring equinox of 1975. He explains the group's philosophy like this:

Simply, our aims are the continuation of a certain kind of English painting; we admire Samuel Palmer, Stanley Spencer, Thomas Hardy, Elgar, cricket, English Landscape, the Pre-Raphaelites, etc… Our aims are to paint about love, beauty, joy, sentiment and magic. We still believe in painting with oil paint on canvas, putting the picture in the frame and hopefully, that someone will like it, buy it and hang it on their wall to enjoy it.

Still inside Pepper: the artwork as a miniature encyclopedia of magical England, to be consumed privately at home.