Vanity Fair (Four Corners Familiars)

The Four Corners Familiars series invites contemporary artists to illustrate and produce a new edition of a classic novel or short story. This magnificent edition of William Makepeace Thackeray's Vanity Fair (first published in 1847-48) is the sixth in this series, and is produced by the British artist Donald Urquhart. Urquhart's black-and-white drawing style and subject matter is perfectly suited to the themes of Vanity Fair, which follows the fortunes of its strong-minded and strong-willed anti-heroine Becky Sharp through the follies and hypocrisies of early nineteenth-century British society. Urquhart's drawings, inspired by the fashions and iconography of 1930s Hollywood, focus exclusively on Becky Sharp. I wanted to sideline all the secondary characters, says Urquhart. The novel is newly typeset in Perpetua and Felicity (partly chosen for their feminine names), typefaces designed by Eric Gill.