BOOKS
Susan Benson is one of Canada’s great costume and theatrical costume and set designers. Her legendary productions include A Midsummer Night’s Dream with Jessica Tandy and Maggie Smith, The Woman with Martha Henry, and Brian Macdonald’s Gilbert and Sullivan operettas at Stratford; the National Ballet’s Romeo and Juliet; and Madama Butterfly and The Golden Ass for the Canadian Opera Company. Patricia Flood’s book is a lavish exploration of Susan’s five-decade career. Pat invited Punch & Judy to design the 9"x 11", 144-page book. Published in 2019 by Firefly Books.
Robert Harris, the eminent Toronto musicologist and frequent guest on Michael Enright’s The Sunday Edition on CBC Radio, has presented a series of lectures over the past five seasons for Stratford Summer Music. Ten of those lectures were selected for publication in 2018. Punch & Judy designed and selected the illustrations for this 6"x 9" book, 176-pages, softcover with French flaps, and supervised the production and printing. The essays are superb and Scott recommends that you order a copy from Stratford Summer Music!
Punch & Judy was honored to design a definitive 542-page biography of William Hutt in 2017. Hutt passed away in 2007 after a long and brilliant career — he was a member of the inaugural Stratford Festival acting company in 1953, and was widely regarded as Canada's most distinguished classical actor. Kieth Garebian’s biography would have been published earlier except for a contract dispute with it's original publisher. Matt Mackey navigated the project around these logistical roadblocks and asked Scott to design and produce the book. Scott’s favorite part of the project was the extensive picture research, which turned up a number of previously unpublished treasures documenting Hutt’s career.
Bedford St. Martins, the venerable publishing house in Boston, contacted Punch & Judy in 2012 to design a university-level textbook by Carrie Hintz and Eric Trubunella entitled Reading Children’s Literature. In addition to the design, Scott illustrated the cover and twelve chapter numerals, and chose many of the interior illustrations. The book was published in 2013.
Scott was perhaps a natural choice for designer and picture researcher for a book commemorating the Shaw Festival’s 50th anniversary in 2011 because he designed the house programmes for so many of the productions represented (and has an archive of production photography in the studio). Author Leonard Conolly started work on the text five of six years in advance — on two or three occasions over that period of time Leonard was in London, England, at the same time as Scott and Christina on their annual picture research trip for The Shaw’s programmes, so they arranged to have breakfast meetings at The Wolsley, next door to The Ritz on Piccadilly, to discuss the anniversary book project! The book is 9"x 12", 312 pages, published by Oxford University Press.
Scott and Christina produced a Twelve Days of Christmas series of personal holiday cards — one “day” per year starting in 2000. Instead of the usual Medieval European story-book setting, these illustrations feature the birds, farms and rural traditions near Scott and Christina’s home in Stratford, Ontario. Lionel Koffler at Firefly Books had received the cards, one by one over the years, and when the series wrapped up in 2011, he brought up the idea of publishing a small book for the holidays. Scott and Christina were thrilled to share the series with a wider audience. The book is 7"x 10", 32 pages; it was published in 2o13.
