How the limited editions came into being

Chapbooks, Broadsheets and Toni Savage

When creating his limited edition projects Spike Milligan went to the Leicester printer, Toni Savage. Savage was quite unique and it is not hard to see why Spike worked with him.

Toni Savage aka Antonio Slavarezza had been a principal tenor at the Teatro La Fenice in Venice in the early 1950s. His career came to an end after losing a lung through illness. He became fascinated with the creative possibilities of Letterpress printing. His day job was as an engineer but in Leicester there were many small printers and in his spare time he worked with many of them, learning the craft of printing and eventually he started producing his own printing work. He produced his first broadsheet in 1959, an Italian song, Vaga Luna Che Inargenti.

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Toni and Theatre

Toni's other creative interests were the theatre and folk singing. He had a long association with the Phoenix Theatre in Leicester and commenced a folk club, The Ampersand Folk Club. He did suffer from ill health and bouts of depression in this busy life.

He had many contacts with people in the theatre and commenced publishing poetry on broadsheets for many artists and writers. His first work for Spike was in the late 1960s, the chapbook containing thirteen poems entitled 'Values'.

Values was printed in collaboration with, Duine Campbell who owned the print press the book was printed on. Campbell describes the experience in his book on Toni Savage, A Paper Snowstorm.

"When Spike Milligan gave him some moving and un-funny poems to print, he leapt at the chance. Not in the least because Spike was famous, but mainly because Toni, too, knew the dark place which the poems had come, and probably also because everyone else thought them worthless. We chose a difficult laid paper, because it was right, and he asked Rigby Graham to do some illustrations for it, because he was good, and Graham, not one to go for the slick simple way out, produced illustrations that, when processed, gave blocks that were a good 3" x 4", and solid colour with it.

They were at the limit of what my small Adana would print, and the paper made it worse. Plenty of sheets were discarded as not up to scratch, and for printing many of the blocks we had to put the press on the floor and take turns to jump on the handle to get anything like an impression. Did we put 'printed by hand and foot' in the colophon? I can't remember."

They didn't but this was the first of many chapbooks and broadsheets Toni Savage did for Spike Milligan.