The+Book

The Book The decisions in terms of the aesthetic design of the book were carefully made in the style of a fine arts press book. The book is small enough to be handheld and portable and it is fairly simple in design, but the decisions about the binding, the typeface, and the paper are all very deliberate to bring out the beauty of the book and harken back to the quality of design of handmade Renaissance books. The foredge:

Spine of the book: Paper: Frontispiece:
 * The foredge of the book is protected by the cover, which folds over the edge and almost closes when the book is all the way closed.
 * The spine of the book has the title of the book at the top and the date of publication at the bottom.
 * The style of the binding (and much of the rest of the stylistic choices in the book are much like Erasmus' //Praise of Follie// (1901), both of which are fairly characteristic of fine arts press books.
 * The paper is laid paper and you can see vertical chain lines.
 * The same paper is used as end paper, but there is a darker rectangle on the endpapers that allows one to see the chain lines and watermarks more easily.
 * A watermark is visible on some sheets of paper and on the back endpaper, which is most likely “VAN GELDER ZONE” as the watermark.
 * The paper also has deckled edges on three sides and the top side is cut.

Was it Read?
 * Humanist typeface that refers back to Renaissance scholarly texts. Also, on the frontispiece, “Modern Love” and the Roman numeral year are rubricated but nothing else in the book is.
 * There are almost no illustrations, except for Mosher's printer's mark on the fronstispiece of two dolphins holding up a book. Also, there are decorative swirls suggestive of leaves on the cover, by the title, before the sonnet cycle starts, before "Other Poems", and at the end of all of the poems.
 * <span style="font-family: Georgia,serif;">The outside of the book looks somewhat dirty and worn but the pages on the inside look barely touched. It doesn’t look like it was read and if it was it was treated very carefully. Perhaps it was on someone’s shelf or in their collection but was unread.
 * <span style="font-family: Georgia,serif;">It seems as if it was intended to be read because the tops of the pages were all cut, except for pages 137/138 and 139/140, which are the only two pages still joined together at the top.
 * <span style="font-family: Georgia,serif;">The only other evidence of human interaction with the book is the library cataloguing information. A Goucher book slips says that it belongs to the “Friends of the Goucher College Library” collection. It also has “80-32” written on the very last page in pencil (it is the only marginalia in the book).