Quotes from books old enough to be free
Most literary merchandise is quoting something it has no right to quote. We went the other way on purpose.
Everything here comes from work in the public domain — Austen, the Brontës, Poe, Dickens, Shelley, Stoker, Shakespeare, Keats, Alcott, Wilde, Conan Doyle. Books old enough that the words belong to everybody now. We set them from the original text, never from a film still, a cover design or an illustrator's version of a character. If a quotation isn't clearly free to use, it doesn't get made, however well it would sell.
That constraint turned out to be the interesting part. Working only with the books themselves means reading them properly, and the designs that come out of it tend to be for people who have done the same.
"I declare after all there is no enjoyment like reading" is one of ours. Caroline Bingley says it in Pride and Prejudice while barely looking at her book, trying to get Darcy's attention — so anyone who has quoted it sincerely is in on a joke two hundred years old. Jacob Marley's "I wear the chain I forged in life" is a Christmas design and a ghost story at the same time, which is what A Christmas Carol actually is. The attribution sits quietly under each piece. You are not expected to need it.
The type is drawn rather than generated, at print resolution, so the letters are the letters and the spelling is the spelling. Paper stock, garment colour and ink are chosen for the piece rather than applied from a template.
Nothing here is personalised, and that is deliberate. A design specific enough to be about a particular book, read a particular way, does the job that a name printed on a mug is usually asked to do.
Hope You Enjoy!
Scott
