Rime of the Ancient Mariner

• Book Design, Illustration, Lettering
• Student work, RISD Continuing Ed, Graphic Design Final Studio
• 2023

I’m designing and illustrating a book of Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner, for which I’m using my own typeface, Sibylline. The concept of the book is the poem’s many textual layers—multiple published versions, handwritten revisions, a later marginal gloss added by the author, not to mention its framing narrative and a detour into dramatic dialogue —and how they come together with the poem’s imagery of veiled and distorted perception. For the main text, I’m using the one from Coleridge’s 1817 collection Sibylline Leaves; textual variants from the 1798 and 1800 Lyrical Ballads are hand-lettered underneath the typeset text, as is the marginal gloss, which tries to cram itself into the spurious “spaces” created by overlapping layers of color.

(This is a work in progress. The final version won’t have type occluded by the spine, for instance!)