“Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita mi ritrovai per una selva oscura…” “…Midway upon the journey of our life I found myself in a dark wilderness.”
So begins Dante’s Inferno, the first in the trilogy that makes up The Divine Comedy.
While I’ve never been a big fan of or believer in the Christian hell, I love Dante as a poet and a writer. His Divine Comedy is obviously a treasure of the western literary canon. I also love literature in translation. And so when I found out that Thornwillow Press was publishing the new translation by Anthony Esolen in a hand-lettered letterpress edition, I was pretty excited. I was much more excited that there was a state of the edition that I could afford! This is the fifth copy, and the fourth(?) translation of the Inferno I own and this review was a great excuse to re-read it. It will sit nicely next to my Folio Society edition with Blake’s illustrations, the Easton Press edition with Barry Moser’s illustrations, the Sandow Birk & Marcus Sanders edition, and the Seymour 
Chwast graphic novel version. And the shelf could get more crowded in the future as there are certainly other editions out there I’d like to have (the Limited Editions Club edition I would guess) and probably more editions to come in the future. Dante’s vision and light shows no sign of dimming. But there is ample literary criticism out there by much more knowledgeable readers than myself, so I’ll get right into this edition as an object and as a reading experience.
One of the more remarkable things about the Thornwillow Press is the way they fund their projects through Kickstarter, or crowdfunding. This allows them to size the edition to the demand and get their funding up front, thereby reducing what is probably one of the greatest risks for private press editions. Another compelling feature of their projects is the number of states and specials that they offer: for Dante there was a paper-wrapped, a half cloth, a half leather, and a full leather 
state. The full leather was offered in six different versions: three one-of-a-kind versions and three versions of six copies each. The nice thing about this wide offering is that there is more range in the pricing. The paper-wrapper version at the $85 offering price is an exceptional value for letterpress printing in my opinion. I’ll be interested to see how the paper-wrapper binding holds up with handling over time. I’m a careful reader but I can see that it would be easy to damage the wrapper and potentially the text block without the protection of the boards of the hardcover states. Other nice features of their publishing model include the ability to choose a limitation number if you wish and to have your name on a subscribers list that is included with each book.
While each edition of Dante’s Inferno out there has its pros and cons, this one was different and compelling in that it was done in an “artist’s manuscript” style by George Cochrane. The artist hand-lettered the text en-face in English and Italian. The margins are illustrated with line drawings that follow the text in the tradition of illuminated medieval manuscripts. The illustrations taken alone don’t particularly move me but work well as integrated and paired with the text. The text itself is packed in pretty tightly with a minimal spacing between lines. Although I had little trouble reading it, I did find myself losing the line occasionally due to the denseness of the text and maybe because of the 
style of the hand lettering. But, again, the lettering is definitely part of the charm of the edition, so I didn’t mind it while reading. However, I did notice more than the usual number of mistakes in the text for a private press. I’m not sure whether that is due to an inadequate amount of proofreading or whether the errors were noticed but correcting the hand lettering was too much trouble, too costly, or just plain impossible due to the availability of the artist.
The text is printed in two colors: black and red. While that makes for a striking layout on the pages that use both colors, there are only two that do. I wish they would have been a little more generous with the red, maybe using it with the first initial of every canto or even just the canto number. That would have made it a bit easier to find each canto on the page or to go back and find favorite passages. Without that, and with no page or line numbers, it was a bit of a slog to find passages quickly.
All in all, I applaud Thornwillow Press for publishing works of this scope, their scaling of edition states to multiple price points, and for their innovative way of funding the projects. I’ve funded their upcoming Pride and Prejudice as well so I will hopefully be posting about that in the spring. Once again that will be in the paper-wrapper but I hope to see and/or review one of the other states at some point in the future.
AVAILABILITY: The edition appears to be 1137 copies: 21 copies in various full leather states; 66 copies in half leather; 150 unbound; 300 half cloth; and 600 copies in paper-wrappers as reviewed above. The paper-wrapper edition is still available directly from the press.
