New Edgar Allan Poe Edition Binding Features Brick Dust from his Home
Fine artist book producer Arion Press has released a curated selection of poems and stories by Edgar Allan Poe in an edition equal to the 19th-century master of the macabre.
The two-volume set is notable on two counts. It presents a fresh, psychologically acute interpretation of Poe’s masterpiece The Raven through vivid images by artist Natalie Frank centering on the lost female love. And it uses the raw matter of Poe’s own life, physically incorporating pulverized bricks excavated from his New York City home into a binding that creepily recalls the immuring central to several of his tales.
Edgar Allan Poe earned his living writing stories for American magazines between 1830 and his unexpected death at the age of 40 in 1849. In his short lifetime he became the pre-eminent chronicler of the unquiet mind. Fourteen of these unnerving tales and four poems are collected in Arion’s presentation.
The two-volume edition features Frank’s inimitable drawings. The main volume in black-and-white images is reminiscent of Victorian vignettes, while the second, The Raven, is a companion volume in brilliant gouache and chalk pastel drawings focused for the first time on the flesh-and-blood woman whose loss inspired one of the most famous refrains in English literature, Nevermore. Read More..