Oak Knoll

Limited to 100 copies. This copy is additionally signed by both John and Rosalind Randle. In fine condition.

From the publisher's website: "Matrix's beginnings were more organic than organised, growing out of whatever happened to be on hand at the time. We had three contributions that were not substantial enough to become books, yet which needed to be published, and together might form the nucleus of a journal. We had a Monotype caster with a die-case for 12-point Caslon, half a ton of lead ingots, and a Wharfedale SW2 cylinder press of 1935 that could print eight octavo pages to view. I had acquired a taste for journalism while working in Fleet Street in the late 60s, and Matrix would make a striking masthead with the Caslon italic swash cap M. And so the stage was set.

The most critical ingredient would be the contributors, and the letters here are chosen from several thousand in the Matrix files at the University of Minnesota at Minneapolis. Up till about 2000 they were often hand-written, or typed, often with a letterpress heading, and many of these are included here. Later on the email would make life a lot easier, but perhaps a little less personal. We have to thank all these contributors for forming the springboard that set Matrix on its way. Its end came about quite unexpectedly, yet quite naturally and painlessly, its task seemingly accomplished.

I thought that by working backwards through the series I might find some sort of common thread that link
ed them all together. But by the time I got to 15, I realised the impossibility of the task. They are such a mish-mash of people, events and ideas that each issue seems an individual in its own right, though David Butcher made a brave attempt to find a common theme in his Matrix at Twenty-one in the Index to Matrix 1-21. But what they may have done is to put on record personalities and events that would otherwise have disappeared from memory. Hopefully this will be the legacy of the series."