The Beautifull Cassandra
I’ve now been designing books for the Juvenilia Press for over twenty-five years, and it continues to be a high point in my design life. And so with the recent reboot of this website, I am delighted to share, as my first new portfolio post, my latest Juvenilia Press project, hot off the presses, The Beautifull Cassandra by Jane Austen, with illustrations and afterwords by Juliet McMaster.
This book is an update and reissue of an older 1993 edition published by Sono Nis Press out of Victoria, British Columbia. Unfortunately, Sono Nis suffered a warehouse fire back in 2016 which destroyed the remaining stock of that edition. As the founder of Juvenilia Press, through which many Jane Austen works have previously been published, Juliet offered to “rehome” The Beautifull Cassandra with the Juvenilia Press.
I am delighted that Christine Alexander, the current Director and General Editor of the Juvenilia Press, agreed because that meant I got to work on this delightful little project.
Armed with brand new scans of the original illustrations, I first went about updating the cover design to better match the house style of the Juvenilia Press, something that has been evolving from my original two designs twenty-five+ years ago.
The interiors got some slight updates to the typography, but the biggest change has been the vibrancy of the new scans, which only required a bit of touching up on my part.
This book is now also unique amongst Juvenilia Press books for having these beautiful red fly leaves, which the original 1993 edition had and were retained for this new edition.
Copies are available from the Juvenilia Press website.
To learn more about my history with the Juvenilia Press, check out my post about them over at the Butterflies & Aliens Library of Literary Eccentricities & Rarities