de umbrarum regni novem portis
Apr. 4th, 2010 06:40 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jazzfishI'm currently rereading a book for the sheer joy of the book itself. Not the words on the page (which are also quite enjoyable), but because the physical object makes me happy.
Back in December, Subterranean Press had a special on pre-orders: buy at least five and get 50% off. I took the opportunity to pick up this gorgeous limited edition of Arturo Perez-Reverte's The Club Dumas along with some other cheaper stuff, and the whole order came in at less than the original cost of The Club Dumas.
(The Club Dumas is a detective story about a book dealer who's hired to investigate and authenticate a manuscript chapter of Alexandre Dumas's The Three Musketeers and a probably forged copy of The Nine Doors of the Kingdom of Shadows, a seventeenth-century manual for summoning the Devil. It is delightfully convoluted, and features life imitating art imitating life in ways that remind me a little of Foucault's Pendulum. The Nine Doors half of the plot was turned into a mediocre thriller starring Johnny Depp some years ago, of which we shall not speak.)
The book showed up on my doorstep last weekend. It is a thing of beauty. I've never really given much thought to the physicality of a book while I was reading it, but The Club Dumas almost demands one's attention. The print's dark and legible, the little section-break designs catch the eye pleasantly, and Vincent Chong has done a wonderful job with the illustrations. There's a small one for the start of each chapter, and five full-color plates that remind me of the art style from Thief: The Dark Project, if its cinematics had been hand-painted still images instead of pixelated 640x480 AVIs.
It's hefty, too. Subterranean used good-quality paper for this (something else I'd never thought I'd notice) and my fingers glide right over it. I think they said it was 80# paper. It's definitely got more of a heft to it than any other trade-sized hardback I can think of. To put this in perspective, two weeks ago I picked up a remaindered copy of Neal Stephenson's Anathem, because I've heard that unlike other books by Stephenson this one has an ending. It's over 900 pages long. The Club Dumas, in contrast, clocks in at just over three hundred. The Club Dumas is heavier than a book three times its length. Edit: an actual weighing determined that this is not in fact true, but it's closer than you'd think. I suppose the high density makes The Club Dumas seem heavier.
Possibly the neatest thing about this book is the dust jacket. I read hardbacks without the jacket on, to avoid tearing it up. When I took this one off, something that looked like scuffing inside caught my eye. I frowned and took a closer look. Yeah, it's scuffed. Deliberately so. The inside of the jacket looks like ... a folio bound in black leather, in the Venetian style, with no title on the outside but with five raised bands on the spine and a golden pentacle on the front cover.
Yep, the jacket's reversible, so that you too can have a forged copy of De umbrarum regni novem portis on your shelf. Awesome.
Back in December, Subterranean Press had a special on pre-orders: buy at least five and get 50% off. I took the opportunity to pick up this gorgeous limited edition of Arturo Perez-Reverte's The Club Dumas along with some other cheaper stuff, and the whole order came in at less than the original cost of The Club Dumas.
(The Club Dumas is a detective story about a book dealer who's hired to investigate and authenticate a manuscript chapter of Alexandre Dumas's The Three Musketeers and a probably forged copy of The Nine Doors of the Kingdom of Shadows, a seventeenth-century manual for summoning the Devil. It is delightfully convoluted, and features life imitating art imitating life in ways that remind me a little of Foucault's Pendulum. The Nine Doors half of the plot was turned into a mediocre thriller starring Johnny Depp some years ago, of which we shall not speak.)
The book showed up on my doorstep last weekend. It is a thing of beauty. I've never really given much thought to the physicality of a book while I was reading it, but The Club Dumas almost demands one's attention. The print's dark and legible, the little section-break designs catch the eye pleasantly, and Vincent Chong has done a wonderful job with the illustrations. There's a small one for the start of each chapter, and five full-color plates that remind me of the art style from Thief: The Dark Project, if its cinematics had been hand-painted still images instead of pixelated 640x480 AVIs.
It's hefty, too. Subterranean used good-quality paper for this (something else I'd never thought I'd notice) and my fingers glide right over it. I think they said it was 80# paper. It's definitely got more of a heft to it than any other trade-sized hardback I can think of. To put this in perspective, two weeks ago I picked up a remaindered copy of Neal Stephenson's Anathem, because I've heard that unlike other books by Stephenson this one has an ending. It's over 900 pages long. The Club Dumas, in contrast, clocks in at just over three hundred. The Club Dumas is heavier than a book three times its length. Edit: an actual weighing determined that this is not in fact true, but it's closer than you'd think. I suppose the high density makes The Club Dumas seem heavier.
Possibly the neatest thing about this book is the dust jacket. I read hardbacks without the jacket on, to avoid tearing it up. When I took this one off, something that looked like scuffing inside caught my eye. I frowned and took a closer look. Yeah, it's scuffed. Deliberately so. The inside of the jacket looks like ... a folio bound in black leather, in the Venetian style, with no title on the outside but with five raised bands on the spine and a golden pentacle on the front cover.
Yep, the jacket's reversible, so that you too can have a forged copy of De umbrarum regni novem portis on your shelf. Awesome.