4 by Poe
Date: 2010
Dimensions: 5.675" x 8.5"
Project: Four fully illustrated short stories by Edgar Allan Poe, each published quarterly as an individual limited-edition softcover volume. Readers could either subscribe to the series or collect individual issues. And each delivery was a surprise – subscribers never knew which story was being published next.
Sixteen original illustrations were executed in graphite on 90-pound Stonehenge Cream paper. Volumes were printed in Massachusetts on SFI-certified paper using a digital offset press.
Watch my TEDxBoston talk about the project.Opening spread designs were inspired by posters of the Antebellum Period.
Titles were set in a custom-designed typeface called Tamerlane, which was based on the frontispiece of Poe’s first published collection of poems.
The stories include “intruding” shoulder notes. The page grid itself is an inversion of the Golden Canon—a compositional method pioneered during the fifteenth century in order to enforce harmonious relationships among the elements on the page.
