Book design: Utopia by Thomas More

Book

This edition of More's Utopia was published in 1684. There is a charm in reading a book like this in an early edition. Not only are there the curious spellings ("vertues" not "virtues" or "collegue" not "colleague"), but certain words are capitalized or italicized, each page ends with the first word of the next page, and the language is appropriate to the book itself. A facsimile edition was impossible from the copy because of the amount of work required to clean the pages to make them easily readable, although the book is in good condition. It was decided to retype the pages. They have been set in IM Fell English.* Retyping required fitting each line to the full measure, as in the original, and substituting the appropriate glyphs (for: ct, s, ss, st, sh, si, sl, ff, ffi, ffl, fi, fl).

Book design

The reconstructed facsimile required no design work per se, but adherence to the original typesetting made the project challenging.

Cover

The book was repaired in 1826, and it was decided to use this cover as a model. The front cover is actually blank, but the spine has the title, author's name, and date, gold debossed in a red leather panel. We extended it across the front cover to recreate the effect.