‘Of all the monsters in my closet, this is the one that scares me most, and probably always will.’
- Stephen King
Housed in a black cloth slipcase, blocked in cream and gold and with curved edges to facilitate removing the book, it is the attention to detail that makes this new limited edition such a fitting tribute to Stoker’s gothic masterpiece. From the carmine leather binding, beautifully blocked with a design by Angela Barrett featuring howling wolves, a forbidding castle, bats, garlic and a crucifix, to the red laid endpapers which perfectly set off the parchment-like limitation label, printed in red, numbered by hand and signed by the artist, every aspect has been carefully considered.
Each of the 15 intensely brooding colour plates is set within one of five intricate borders which represent the places in which the episodes illustrated take place. There are slathering wolves, and sleeping bats interwoven through sinister boughs of conifer for Transylvania; high-masted ships and the ruins of the abbey for Whitby; frail fragments of spiders’ webs, complete with spiders, for Purfleet; tall, slender townhouses for London, and threatening conifers, their malevolent roots twining round a steam launch, for the desperate race towards Dracula’s castle.
Brief descriptions do not begin to do justice to the complexity of the drawings; the borders alone more than repay contemplation and the colour plates too are incredibly complex and uncommonly disturbing. Barrett has gone back to the novel and each image is faithful in every detail to Stoker’s descriptions. Count Dracula may have outgrown the book to become the quintessential vampire, but the frontispiece portrait of him shows the aquiline nose, arched nostrils and massive eyebrows envisaged by the author to perfection, it also includes the nails ‘long and fine, and cut to a sharp point’.
Then there are the nine different black-and-white tailpieces, some like the bat and the crucifix are repeated and others, such as the terrified horses surrounded by baying wolves that ends the first chapter, are specific to a particular scene.
All three page edges are gilded and there is a black ribbon marker for this is, above all, a book to read, the ultimate gothic horror story in the ultimate collector’s edition.
