WIP Wednesday: Typesetting Jane Austen's "Persuasion"
Thank you so much for tagging me to share one of my bookbinding WIPs (more speciffically my Austen bind), @hobbitwrangler! 💚😁
As mentioned in a tag game a few days ago I recently noticed a truly scandalous absence of nice, compact hard copy editions of my favorite Austen novel „Persuasion“ on my bookshelves. So what is a girl to do than to make her own copy from a downloaded txt file available on Project Gutenberg ^_^
I want this one to be quite a bit more flowery and whimsical than my Tolkien fic binds. But apart from that design goal I am still very much at the "oooooh you know what else could be cool?" stage of figuring out what I want this book to look and feel like:
A six hour train ride on Monday was spent losing myself in early 19th century art and fashion magazines, nature books and dance instruction manuals for visual inspiration which was tremendous fun. [Did I ever mention that I love online public domain archives? Because I LOVE online public domain archives! ^_^]. So my evenings this week are spent playing with those elements to see if they give way to more specific ideas for typefonts and cover material.
I also taught myself how to bully our graphic design suite into isolating and sprucing up those graphics a bit (less fun, but I think for another first the results aren‘t too shabby). (Un)Fortunately, this unlocked a true pandora‘s box of possibilities. A 16-pager from 1816 on Muslin patterns alone will probably keep me occupied for the rest oft the week ^_^
These are a few ideas I am playing with at the moment:
The circular element around the "III" is taken from a 1877 dance manual called "Le cotillon et les quadrilles actuels - Traité théoretique et pratique". It describes one of the final figures of the cotillon, a dance that was - in varying forms - around when Anne met Frederick. I really like how it looks kind of modern but actually is anything but.
And an example of my muslin patterns (as yet untouched by any graphic design shenanigans) because I really love them:
So, TLDR: Nothing definite yet but lots of fun getting there! ^_^
No pressure tagging @ailendolin, @illegalcerebral, @sotwk, @thescrapwitch, @rosemary-andtime (a fellow fledgling bookbinder if I remember correctly?), @esta-elavaris and anyone else wanting to share a bit about a current WIP. Writing, arts, crafts, anything goes! 😁
