The last few years at Canterbury Faire have seen various bits of what can probably best be described as somewhere between street theatre, practical jokes, and Banksian art, perpetrated by agents of the Ildhafn Conspiracy Team.
This year (2012), in a continuation of last year's fun with the Banco di Don Julio (an enterprise of Mistress katherine kerr), and after watching various banking institutions in the real world come, go, be bailed out and have various ratings applied to them, it was felt that the Banco di Don Julio should not be left out. So, in the spirit of The Onion, a satirical newspaper was brought into life for Canterbury Faire, promoting nothing but the most relevant and important news that the Kingdom had to offer and needed to know. Honest, really. And while it would have been lovely to be able to point to various pre-1600 newspapers and other works, and to provide well researched documentation as to this enterprise being an authentic practice, I can't. This was simply a whole lot of fun (and as it turned out, a whole lot of work), although some efforts were made to give the newspapers a look and feel that was at least not blatantly modern.
The various woodcuts came from the University of California's English Broadside Ballad archive, and the primary fonts used are JSL Ancient and JSL Blackletter.
And so, we present the finished works:
The Leek - published on the opening Saturday of Canterbury Faire, declaring amongst other things that Politarchopolis had declared independence.
Das Liek - published on the Monday of Canterbury Faire, carrying the financial news for the week including the AAA rating for the Banco di Don Julio by the Poor Standards rating agency.
The Leak - published on the Wednesday of Canterbury Faire, bringing all of the finest sporting results from around the Kingdom and the Known Worlde.
The Leke - published on the final Saturday of Canterbury Faire, announcing the headline act for the next Half-Circle Theatre, and presenting reviews of the latest arts and cultural happenings.
As it turned out, we were not the only ones to get into the publishing business this year at Canterbury Faire. Quite by chance, Mistress katherine kerr had decided to publish not one, but two newsbooks, which resulted in three different papers making the rounds and hopefully both delighting and informing the readership. I don't think we could've planned it better if we'd actually been trying.