Rain Rider is a book of echoes and allusions, mirrors and reflections: words are signs that keep changing their position, taking new forms, suggesting new ideas, as they recur, recto/verso. Briggs’s vision is essentially ludic and irreverent, whether he’s evoking the plangent nostalgia of the Test Card, conjuring the Devil, or riffing on an artisan perfume. Rain Rider is a book of forms, of thought poured into vessels: it begins with a rain-filled chalice and closes with an upended urn of ashes. Through it all, in a returning sequence, we find archetypal figures – the Fool, the Hermit, the Mariner and Thief – as though running amok in the serifed leading of the typeface.