Into the Dark with Tales of Mystery and Imagination
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On 3 October 1849*, a wet and chilly day, the printer Joseph Walker found an obviously unwell and distressed man at Ryan’s 4th Ward Polls, a Baltimore tavern also known as Gunner’s Hall. The man was able to give him the name of a local acquaintance, physician and temperance activist Dr Joseph Snodgrass. Walker quickly wrote to Dr Snodgrass: ‘Dear Sir – There is a gentleman, rather the worse for wear, at Ryan’s 4th ward polls, who goes under the cognomen Edgar A. Poe, and who appears in great distress, & he says he is acquainted with you, and I assure you, he is in need of immediate assistance. Yours, in haste, Jos. W. Walker.’
‘I immediately repaired to the drinking-saloon – for such it was, although dignified by the designation of tavern – and, sure enough, there was Edgar Allan Poe, in a condition which had been but too faithfully described by Mr Walker,’ wrote Dr Snodgrass in Beadle’s Monthly, May 1867. The author was sitting in an armchair in the bar, with his head drooping forward, dressed in a soiled black coat and tattered hat, and ‘so stupefied by liquor and so altered from the neatly
dressed and vivacious gentleman which he was when I last had the pleasure of a call from him… His face was haggard, not to say bloated, and unwashed, his hair unkempt, and his whole physique repulsive.’ Snodgrass immediately took his friend to the Washington College Hospital, where he died
a few days later, aged just 40. Poe’s strange and horrific death remains an enigma. (Murder? Alcohol poisoning? His final payment in some dark, demonic deal?) Fitting, perhaps, for this author whose best-known works, Tales of Mystery and Imagination and ‘The Raven’, are steeped in death, terror and dread. But stories such as ‘Murder in the Rue Morgue’ and ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’ live on, not just in Poe’s work, but as an influence in pretty much every work of horror, crime and fantasy written since.
‘Normally, when we’re celebrating an anniversary, it’s the birth of an author, not the death, because that is somewhat macabre. But given that it’s Poe, celebrating his death felt more appropriate,’ says Publishing Director Tom Walker. ‘And his writing still feels so contemporary. His style is weird and fantastical at times but it’s also laden with psychological realism – and the Tales still feel shockingly original.’
It seems like a small body of work to have such an impact. But as acclaimed horror and fantasy writer Joe Hill states in his introduction to Folio’s new limited edition: ‘An atom is also small, but if you smash one open, you can set off a detonation big enough to obliterate a city.’ And Poe’s extraordinary influence sparked a challenge for Folio: how do you create something new and exciting to honour such a well-loved body of work?
‘We wanted to make it spooky!’ says Production Director Kate Grimwade. ‘And whenever we’re planning a book, we always start from the outside in. So we came up with the slightly gruesome idea of presenting it in a box designed to look like a ribcage. You open the box and there is the book – which has a heart as its cover. We also wanted to publish Poe’s ‘The Raven’ with the Tales, as a separate booklet, as there is a tradition of publishing it that way. But to make it truly special, we had to call upon some truly extraordinary craftspeople.’
Enter Pat Randle, founder of Nomad Letterpress. He works with machines acquired by his father back in the 1970s, when traditional hot metal printing, around since the Gutenberg era, was being sold for scrap – the process having been superseded by more cost-efficient technology. ‘Nowadays there’s a resurgence in the craft of printing. People want to get their hands on these machines, as they’re not manufactured anymore,’ he says. ‘We are also incredibly lucky to have one employee, who is 70, who did one of the last monotype apprenticeships – the process by which you make hot-metal type.’
Masque of the Red Death
MS Found in a Bottle.
Pat used these hot-metal letterpress techniques to print ‘The Raven’ as a booklet, using the Walbaum typeface, which was popular in Poe’s time, on Liber Charta mould-made paper. ‘The booklet is covered in a textured black paper which feels absolutely perfect – like raven’s feathers,’ says Kate. The booklet’s two polymer illustrations, in particular, demonstrate just how well letterpress printing suits this edition. ‘You get a much denser level of black in comparison to litho or digital reproduction,’ explains Pat. ‘The paper takes the text very nicely, and as it’s a heavy weight – 145 grams – you can get a really nice, deep impression. The whole thing works together beautifully with the book and the box.’
The wonderfully unsettling and detailed illustrations in both the book and the booklet were created by Evangeline Gallagher, who won Folio’s 2022 Book Illustration Award for their interpretation of ‘The Masque of the Red Death’. ‘It was so exciting to discover Evangeline’s work through the award,’ says Kate. ‘I particularly love the way their illustrations are integrated throughout the whole book, as both full pages and chapter headings.’
The book itself – available as a limited edition of just 500 copies – is quarter-bound in leather with two illustrations foil-blocked on the front and back onto cloth sides. The text is printed in two colours on Munken Pure paper. This paper gives very smooth, matte pages, enhancing the glorious detail of Evangeline’s illustrations. Binders Smith Settle, who have worked with Folio over the past 25 years, used Indian goatskin leather sourced in the UK to hand-bind each copy. ‘This kind of binding brings it all together,’ says Kate. ‘It’s such unusual design, particularly the spine. We wanted to use Evangeline’s artwork as they designed it – as a continuous piece. So, we have those wonderful eyes down the spine. And we have continued that motif around the page edges.’
Macabre, weird, fantastic and a true one-off: this edition brings together everything that is special about Poe – and about the craft of Folio limited editions. As Tom Walker says: ‘If you’re obsessed by Poe, then you’ll be obsessed by this book.’
Morella
The Murders in the Rue Morgue.
* There is some confusion as to the exact date the Walker letter was sent. While Snodgrass states that the letter was sent on Tuesday 1 November 1849, the Smithsonian Magazine suggests that the letter was sent on 3 October 1849 – four days before Poe died. Just one more puzzle surrounding the 19th century’s man of mystery…
