I love old prints. I buy them though I have nowhere left to hang them. I buy them because they possess a beguiling narrative, an enlightening vernacular lacking in many other forms of art. I buy them for their beautiful naivety, for their satiric bite, for their celebration of the mundane and the magnificent. I buy them because I have no option. And the downside of this curious addiction? There is none. And so I marvel every day at the mementos of Georgian bridge openings, the celebratory fireworks for long since forgotten victories; for the seductive charm of curious fashions, the unfathomable delight of cats with human faces. Yes, dear Paul (for that’s the cat’s name, clearly) sitting on the shoreline, waiting to welcome his master home from sea. Faithful feline with his curiously Hogarthian face.

As ever though, the days of the Old Print Shop are waning. And so I wander around the country towns of Britain and mourn their loss. Book shop, print shop, and pub, where are you now?

Norman Blackburn’s magnificent shop (pictured here, but sadly now gone) offered a welcome chair, scintillating and hilarious conversation, and an open-hearted celebration of the old print in all its marvellous guises. A visit here was one steeped in the generous gift of erudite knowledge and playful delight. Norman, the doyen of print sellers, with an ever present twinkle in his eye. Think naughty schoolboy, think Betjeman humour, think generosity and contagious spirit. Think prints.

And the legacy? Unfathomable, intriguing. Vital and alive. And so The Lanese Print was born. Gifted into life by those long conversations, those rare moments of browsing and savouring. A tale of the power of the print to seduce and persuade. A tale caught striding, part-formed, through the doors of the Old Print Shop.