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Frankenstein (Limited Edition)

Out of Stock

Mary Shelley

Frankenstein (Limited Edition)

or, The Modern Prometheus

£300

Illustrated By Angela Barrett

Introduced By Richard Holmes

Relish the thrilling horror of Frankenstein in this stunning Folio limited edition. The authoritative 1831 text is bound in ice-blue leather and illustrated with intensely brooding colour plates by Angela Barrett. Limited to just 750 hand-numbered copies, each signed by the artist, Mary Shelley’s darkly disturbing tale is newly introduced by Richard Holmes.

● Only 0 Left in Stock

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Book Details

Production DetailsBound in leather blocked in silver and black foils with a design by Angela Barrett
Cloth-covered slipcase blocked in silver foil with a design by the artist
Printed on Abbey Pure Rough paper
Silvered on all three page-edges
Ribbon marker
Limitation label signed by Angela Barrett

Dimensions10 inches x 6¾ inches

FontTypeset in Clifford with Operetta as display

Pages232 pages

AuthorMary Shelley

Illustrated ByAngela Barrett

IllustrationFrontispiece and seven colour plates printed on Arctic Volume Ivory paper
Nine black-and-white vignettes

Publication Date27/09/2022

Editor's Notes

‘We will each write a ghost story,’ said Lord Byron

In June 1816 four friends gathered at the Villa Diodati beside Lake Geneva in Switzerland, where, confined indoors during the ‘Year without a Summer’, they devised a ghost story competition for their entertainment. Mary Shelley, the youngest participant at just 18, contributed the astonishing tale of Victor Frankenstein, a student of natural philosophy who galvanises into life a creature out of bones collected from charnel houses – a hideous monster of superhuman strength and size. Possessed of human needs and emotions, and educated through books, the creature craves acceptance in society and demands a female companion. His creator’s defiant refusal to provide one provokes the terrifying denouement. Thought-provoking as much as it is thrilling, Frankenstein is indebted to contemporary scientific experiments and philosophical debates, and Shelley unquestionably fulfilled her stated intention to create ‘a story to make the reader dread to look round, to curdle the blood, and quicken the beatings of the heart’.

Synopsis

There can be few books as well-known as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Adapted for stage, film and radio over 100 times, this chilling gothic tale is thought by some to be the very first science-fiction novel. For Folio’s fabulous limited edition, artist Angela Barrett has contributed eight ominously unsettling colour plates, two elaborate hand-drawn borders, nine intricate black-and-white vignettes, and a pair of striking designs on the ice-blue leather binding and black cloth-covered slipcase.

ABOUT THE ILLUSTRATOR

Angela Barrett

Angela Barrett is a writer and illustrator – using watercolour, gouache, coloured pencils and ink – who studied at Maidstone College of Art and the Royal College of Art. She has illustrated a number of picture books and children’s novels and is particularly well known for her work on fairy tales. One of Britain’s most respected illustrators of children’s books, she is the winner of a WH Smith Illustration Award and a Smarties Prize, and has been shortlisted for the Kate Greenaway Medal. Barrett has taught illustration at Cambridge College of Technology and drawing at Chelsea College of Arts. She has illustrated Dracula (1897; Folio 2019) and Anna Karenina (1878; Folio 2008) for The Folio Society.

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ABOUT THE ILLUSTRATOR

Angela Barrett

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ABOUT THE ILLUSTRATOR

Angela Barrett

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ABOUT THE ILLUSTRATOR

Angela Barrett

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ABOUT THE ILLUSTRATOR

Angela Barrett

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ABOUT THE ILLUSTRATOR

Angela Barrett

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English novelist Mary Shelley (1797–1851), was the daughter of political philosopher William Godwin and feminist campaigner Mary Wollstonecraft. Educated at home following her mother’s death when she was just days old, Shelley was tutored to a high level and met several of her father’s intellectual friends including Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Aged 16, she eloped to Italy with the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley whom she later married. Her best-known work, Frankenstein, was first published in 1818 and significantly revised by the author in 1831. Shelley returned to England after her husband’s death and continued to write novels, including The Last Man (1826, Folio 2012), short stories and reviews, as well as promoting her husband’s work. She died in London on 1 February 1851 aged 53.

Richard Holmes is an award-winning British author best known for his biographical studies of major figures of British and French Romanticism. His books include the classic Footsteps (1985) and its companion volume Sidetracks (2000); Shelley: The Pursuit, which won the Somerset Maugham Prize in 1974; Coleridge: Early Visions, which won the 1989 Whitbread Biography of the Year; Coleridge: Darker Reflections, winner of both the Duff Cooper Prize and the Heinemann Award in 1998; The Age of Wonder (2008; The Folio Society 2015) which was shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize and won the Royal Society Prize for Science Books (UK) and the National Book Critics Circle Award (USA); Falling Upwards: How We Took to the Air (2013), which inspired the feature film The Aeronauts (Amazon, 2019); and This Long Pursuit: Reflections of a Romantic Biographer (2017). Holmes is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, a Fellow of the British Academy and an Honorary Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge. He was awarded the OBE in 1992, and in 2014 the Biographers’ Club Prize for Lifetime Services to Biography.