About Suffolk Cards

Suffolk Cards, otherwise known as The Orwell Press, began life as part of a bookshop. It came into being in 1988 (or thereabouts) at the time I was running The Orwell Bookshop in Southwold. The bookshop was sold long ago but I still run the card business single-handedly from Oxford where I now live, and where I spend most of my time writing.

My then wife and I started The Orwell Bookshop in August 1985. We gave the shop this name because it was situated a hundred yards or so down the High Street from the house where George Orwell wrote the early drafts of Down and Out in Paris and London and most of A Clergyman's Daughter.

As well as selling new books we used to sell postcards. These included one of Stanley Spencer's 'Southwold 1937', published by the Aberdeen Art Gallery, and another of a Walberswick painting by Philip Wilson Steer, published by the Tate Gallery. Our customers were so delighted to find these postcard reproductions on sale close to where the originals had been painted that we thought it might be a good idea if we became publishers ourselves.

In the summer of 1988, our tiny but busy bookshop took delivery of 80,000 postcards - 5000 each of sixteen images. It was our aim to sell all these in our own shop and this was what we did, selling out of what was then our our most popular card – Ronald Rutherford's 'Southwold' – after little more than a year.

When we sold the bookshop in 1993, we kept our miniature publishing business and I eventually brought it with me to Oxford.

I come back regularly to Suffolk where you can buy my cards in The Orwell Bookshop (still a flourishing business, now run by Rosemary Stoodley) and in a number of other shops. For more about these shops, click here.

Please, wherever possible, buy your cards from the real living people who run these shops rather from this website. This will not always be practicable, however. For the business remains very much a local one, with 90% of my cards being sold along a 15-mile stretch of the Suffolk coast. Even though the cards are increasingly spreading to other parts of East Anglia, including Cambridge and North Norfolk, the shops that sell them are still few and far between.

Now, however, with the help of this website, (which is itself run by a real living person, namely me) you can buy the cards even if you're not visiting East Anglia.

Part of the reason Suffolk Cards came into being and continues to exist is to document an unusual artistic heritage. For twenty years ago very little information was available about the particular artistic tradition which has made it possible.

Fortunately, in the years that have passed since, a great deal more is known about this tradition. First in the field was the Walberswick painter Richard Scott, whose book Artists at Walberswick: East Anglian Interludes 1880-2000 was published in 2002. Richard's book is now out of print, but two more recent volumes, both of which pay tribute to Richard's pioneering work in the field, are still available.

Ian Collins chapter Making Waves: Artists in Southwold, published by Black Dog Books in 2005, contains a wealth of information about local artsists together with many rare reproductions. So too does Geoffery Munn's Southwold: An Earthly Paradise, which was published by Antique Collectors of Woodbridge later that same year.

(Please order these books from your local bookshop, who need your support more than any online retailer!)

The existence of these three books means that one of the reasons Suffolk cards came into being is no longer quite as important as it was twenty years ago. But there is another, related reason for its existence. The essence of publishing, it has long seemed to me, is to find something which gives you delight and then to endeavour to multiply that delight by making the work of art (or literature) you have discovered as widely available as you can. If this website helps to do this, by making some little-known works of art more widely available, then it will have achieved one of its main purposes.

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