Our new biennial catalogue has gone to press. It carries the work of the coming two years: every family we are making now, every finish we have settled on, and a good deal of what happened in the workshop while we were still deciding. Five hundred pages would have been too many. We kept it to the pieces that had to be there.

Forms, and the light they hold

The book opens with the wall pieces. Brass arms folded one at a time, held a hand's width from the plaster, throwing a shape that goes on changing through the evening. Then the suspended families, where one source is spread across several mouths of blown glass and the light arrives low, soft, slightly uneven. We photographed each of them on a bare wall, at the hour we think it belongs to. The lamp is described in the caption; the page is left to what it does to the room.

• New families released across the two-year cycle, with dimensions, light sources and mounting details
• Pieces carried over from earlier editions, revised in finish and rewired to current standards
• Finish plates: brushed brass, copper leaf, hand-applied patina, smoked and opal glass
• Technical drawings at true scale, printed so they can be lifted off the page and used on site

The marks we left in

Towards the middle the photography stops being polite. Close-ups at actual size, where the reader can see the place the hammer came down, the overlap of one leaf on the next, the pressure of a thumb working patina into a curve. We could have retouched all of it. We did not, because those marks are the part of the object that took the longest to make.

Every catalogue we have produced since our founding has covered a two-year span, and each one closes a period as much as it opens one. This edition gathers what our first years taught us about brass and what the last two taught us about glass. It goes to the architects who specify our pieces, to the showrooms that keep them switched on, and to anyone who writes to ask for a copy.

Printed copies leave the workshop in May. Two years, and we begin again.