Joe sent this when he heard Peter was ill. It was read to Peter the day he died. A beautiful and appropriate message:

Dear Peter
 
I am so sorry to hear that the curtains will soon be falling for you.
 
I remember our first meeting so well. It was at the annual Society of Wood Engravers shindig at the Bankside gallery. I saw some of your engravings and knew that they were in a different league from the conventional efforts of so many others. Then I saw this mercurial figure darting through the room, with pony-tail streaming out behind, talking at a hundred miles an hour, full of beans and full of fun, and it had to be you. And so began one of the most creative relationships I enjoyed with any artist during my Folio years.
 
You started with Shakespeare – Midsummer Night’s Dream and Troilus, and there were more later – and then impressed your personality (and your blocks) on one literary classic after another: Emily Brontë, George Eliot, more Shakespeare of course, with the Sonnets, Pope, Wilde, Peacock, Chaucer and Ambrose Bierce, not to mention the small matter of Fifty epigrams. Probably Wuthering Heights was the book which will be regarded by future ages as your finest hour, but I personally have a soft spot for Romola, which was such a tough nut to crack and for which your solution was simply genius.
 
You were a Prospero of engravers, a maker of visions, and Prospero shall have the last word;
 
We are such stuff As dreams are made on, and our little life Is rounded with a sleep. 
 
Sleep well, Peter,
 
Love from Joe