A new edition of Nineteen Eighty-Four

Nineteen Eighty-Four cover
 
George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four joins A Farewell to Arms among our fiction titles at Libriz today.

We’ll only sell it where the title has entered the public domain, so principally our edition’s for the UK market.

Fully reset, it is arguably easier to read for contemporary eyes. Being a newer title than A Farewell to Arms, earlier publishers’ conventions are similar to today’s, although there was still a considerable amount of work to do to get it technically ship-shape.

As it’s a cautionary tale, 2025—just over 75 years after its original publication—seems to be as good a year as any for a new edition.

My only true contribution is the cover design. For those who have seen François Truffaut’s film adaptation of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, the title sequence has no written type. The credits are read out. But they always struck me as being said “in sans serif”. I don’t associate Helvetica (used here) with fascism, though others (such as Edwin Taylor) once referred to The Guardian’s adoption of the type family as ‘fascist trimmings’. So maybe there is something to its starkness, its officialdom, that seems suited to Nineteen Eighty-Four. The monochrome treatment suggests the same in the dictatorship of Oceania of Orwell; and I tilted the type to suggest the skewed world in which the protagonist, Winston Smith, lives. But not too tilted, because, sadly, his world is not that different to ours, with the same tendencies—after all, 72 per cent of the world is under authoritarian rule. We’re back to 1986 levels, according to Staffan Lindberg at Göteborgs universitet.

The words are in caps because much of Winston Smith’s world is in caps, namely the propaganda slogans. The book itself is set in Malabar, though not because the Malabar coast itself is mentioned in the text. I had thought it a good potential ex post facto justification though. But I simply wanted a more contemporary serif than what we had in A Farewell to Arms, and Malabar worked well.

I didn’t want to re-create Ridley Scott’s Macintosh TVC and once the type was set, an additional image would have spoiled it.

If you would like a freshly typeset and printed copy of Nineteen Eighty-Four, bought online from a vendor who doesn’t have any desire to track you or make it easier for others to do so, then, then here is our Libriz link.


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