The Book of Were-Wolves by Sabine Baring-Gould

This is a Victorian classic on folklore and superstition, reissued with a new foreword by Stephen Graham Jones, so I wanted the design to hold onto its age instead of polishing it away.

A dense, hand-etched frontispiece, thorned vines wrapped around a stake, sets the gothic tone before the title page, which carries a formal, all-caps period treatment with the full descriptive subtitle intact.

The interior keeps that antiquarian feel: small-cap chapter headers with a single ornamental rule, dense opening epigraphs, and footnotes that cite Ovid and Petronius right on the page. Verse from Norse sagas and old ballads breaks into its own justified columns, shifting the rhythm between narration and quoted lore.

The goal was a design that reads like an artifact of its own subject.