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. I wanted the design to hold onto its age instead of polishing it away.

The frontispiece is a dense, hand-etched engraving, thorned vines wrapped around a stake, so the gothic tone is set before the reader even reaches the title page. The title page itself uses a formal, all-caps treatment true to the period, with the full descriptive subtitle kept intact.

The interior carries that same scholarly, antiquarian feel. Chapter headers use small caps with a single ornamental rule. Each one opens with a dense epigraph summarizing what's ahead. Footnotes and citations sit right on the page, footnoting Ovid and Petronius the way the original text would have. Verse passages from Norse sagas and old ballads get their own justified columns, so the page shifts rhythm between narration and quoted lore.

The goal was a design that reads like an artifact of its own subject. A survey of superstition, dressed in the same weathered, scholarly authority as the history it's cataloguing.