Jan. 2019: Mary Hardy and Burnham Press websites redesigned

The websites have a completely new design. Since 2012 there have been three websites, for Burnham Press, Mary Hardy’s World and Mary Hardy’s Diary. Now the pages are all on the one site, Burnham Press.

Benefits of the new design

This now makes it much easier to navigate as there is no need to keep three tabs open at once.

The new design is compatible with all devices: desktop monitors, laptops, tablets and smartphones.

Anyone typing in the old website names will be redirected automatically to the Home page of the new site. The three former sites are then revealed as main pages along the top navigation bar.

Subpages are accessed from the individual sidebars. Some pruning of the old subpages has been carried out, to reduce the bulk of the amalgamated website.

The Home page can be accessed from the rest of the site by clicking on the Burnham Press logo, top left.

The publishers Burnham Press are very grateful to Alex Lister of Canterbury.Digital, who set up the original sites in 2012, for all his work on the transfer from the old sites and for his imaginative layout for the new one.

Combined pages for News

As part of the redesign the News pages of the individual sites have been combined into one listing. It is now much easier to locate an archived News item among the 58 posts as of January 2019.

The News items can, as before, be reached from the top navigation bar.

The fonts

Two fonts are used: Karmina Sans, a strong weighted font, for the body text; and Dolly, very slightly serifed, for the blockquote greyed-down text seen below. Karmina is plump (with a large x-height), making it easy to read on screen.

Like the Plantin and Caslon fonts used in the Burnham Press books they have old-style features such as ligatures and non-lining figures.

The font Dolly also has small caps in its font family, used in the sidebars. These serve as live links as well as headings. Both fonts have old-style (non-lining) figures. Dates are thus typeset with proportional spacing, as in 23 March 1809—an elegant feature for history studies filled with dates.

The banner images

Good illustrations are at the heart of the publishers’ style, and the banners at the top of each page have great visual impact.

Each banner highlights a theme from the Mary Hardy books. All are of scenes or objects familiar to the diarist. The use of water as a highway, for instance; or for power, as on this page. The banner at the top shows the River Glaven upstream of the watermill it powered at the Hardys’ Letheringsett maltings and brewery.

Another view of the power of the Glaven is used as a banner: the cascade (seen below) which mimics the drop to the Letheringsett brewery waterwheel installed by William Hardy in 1784. The bypass channel for the wheel still runs under the main road, emerging from its tunnel just downstream from here.

Water power. Detail of one of the banner images: the cascade by the Hardys’ malt-kilns and the 1818 road bridge

The portrait of Mary Hardy in 1785 is by James Gabriel Huquier (1725–1805), courtesy the Cozens-Hardy Collection.

We hope these pages will not only be informative but will give you pleasure.