Pearl and The Death of King Arthur by Simon Armitage, Faber & Faber
Hardback edition (May 2016) of Simon Armitage’s Pearl, Faber & Faber. Illustration by Emiliano Ponzi.
Simon Armitage’s version of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight garnered front-page reviews across two continents and confirmed his reputation as a leading translator. This new work is an entrancing allegorical tale of grief and lost love, as the narrator is led on a Dantean journey through sorrow to redemption by his vanished beloved, Pearl. Retaining all the alliterative music of the original, a Medieval English poem thought to be by the same anonymous author responsible for Gawain, Pearl is here brought to vivid and intricate life in care of one of the finest poets writing today.
Faber & Faber and Albertus go back a long time. During his more than three decades at the London publisher, Berthold Wolpe created over 1,500 cover and jackets designs, many of them featuring his iconic typeface, often in all caps. Unsurprisingly, Joseph Connolly’s anthology of Eighty Years of Book Cover Design picks up this typography, too. It is a delight to see this tradition continued for the Armitage editions, here paired with congenial illustration.
Hardback (January 2012) and paperback (November 2012) editions of Simon Armitage’s The Death of King Arthur, Faber & Faber. Illustration by Kam Tang, Art direction by Darren Wall.
