Shake-speare’s Sonnets
The Most Authentic Text in a Fine Press Edition
The Petrarch Press edition of Shake-speare’s Sonnets has been the most significant project in our history — both for the end result and for the new skills and capabilities we developed along the way. The decision to print the original text was itself a journey of discovery, in which we abandoned our initial plan to issue (yet another) modernized edition of these timeless poems, and learned to appreciate the orthography of Shakespeare’s day. On the technical side, we acquired equipment to cast our own metal type and material for the book, as well as tools for engraving the special characters needed to print a 17th-century text. Adapting the traditional limp vellum binding to a fine-press book was the final challenge. (more…)