Paul Delrue | Mud Angel

When we published a new edition of Florence: Ordeal by Water - the diaries of Kathrine Kressmann Taylor - I had no idea quite how many new stories and books and writers and readers would bubble up and connect as a direct result of her account of the flooding of the River Arno in Florence in 1966.

So it is a huge honour to reproduce here an essay by one of my favourite artists, Valerie Greeley, who contacted me after reading Florence: Ordeal by Water. Valerie had no idea of the magnitude of the damage caused by the flood until she delved into the book. But a connection to this tragic event had already been laid out for her - one might say, serendipitously…

It was while researching how to bind books almost two decades ago that Valerie met Paul Delrue, who she stumbled across while looking up The Society of Bookbinders. As you will discover from her essay below, she has been happily entranced with his work, and his legacy, ever since.

Here is the story of mud angel Paul Delrue: