The disappearing art of fore-edge painting, and the last man in Britain still doing it for a living

Martin Frost photographed by Richard Cannon © Country Life

published 24 September 2017

There’s a magic to the art of fore-edge painting; to the human eye, the gilded facet of a book is supernaturally transformed into idealised scenes, fictional characters and portraits that bring the contents alive as the pages are fanned.

Like all the best magic tricks, it’s startlingly simple: an image is painted on to the ‘stepped’ incline of the pages that disappears when it’s flat.

Martin Frost is the last commercial fore-edge painter capable of this sorcery. Although the real magic lies in his ability to render his subjects in painstaking miniature. His roots are in working on a larger canvas — he was painting the scenery at Glyndebourne when he realised the possibilities of working on a smaller scale.

At his home in Worthing, West Sussex, Mr Frost painstakingly depicts everything from portraits of literary figures such as Shakespeare and Edgar Allan Poe to minute renderings of scenes from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Frankenstein. Work is either done on commission — many for museums and libraries in the USA — or speculatively.

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Currently for sale is an edition of Cricket published by Longman in 1890, the fore edge of which bears a painting that mourns the infamous defeat of the English team by Australia in 1882 with W. G. Grace at the crease.

Sadly, the future of Mr Frost’s craft is on a similarly sticky wicket and the search is on to find another sorcerer’s apprentice to ensure that it survives into the 21st century.

See more of Martin's work at www.foredgefrost.co.uk

Giles Kime is Country Life's Executive and Interiors Editor, an expert in interior design with decades of experience since starting his career at The World of Interiors magazine. Giles joined Country Life in 2016, introducing new weekly interiors features, bridging the gap between our coverage of architecture and gardening. He previously launched a design section in The Telegraph and spent over a decade at Homes & Gardens magazine (launched by Country Life's founder Edward Hudson in 1919). A regular host of events at London Craft Week, Focus, Decorex and the V&A, he has interviewed leading design figures, including Kit Kemp, Tricia Guild, Mary Fox Linton, Chester Jones, Barbara Barry and Lord Snowdon. He has written a number of books on interior design, property and wine, the most recent of which is on the legendary interior designer Nina Campbell who last year celebrated her fiftieth year in business. This Autumn sees the publication of his book on the work of the interior designer, Emma Sims-Hilditch. He has also written widely on wine and at 26, was the youngest ever editor of Decanter Magazine. Having spent ten years restoring an Arts & Crafts house on the banks of the Itchen, he and his wife, Kate, are breathing life into a 16th-century cottage near Alresford that has remained untouched for almost half a century.