The text is translated by Tobias Smollett and set in Garamond. The printing and binding took place in Germany. Overall, there are a couple of niggles with the production but it’s a nice looking volume that feels worth the £75.00 original retail price. I’m not a great fan of glossy paper in novels, but it’s heavy and opaque, and the brilliant white of the surface shows the illustrations at their best. This is a bright white paper that has a slightly gloss finish. The book is printed on Arctic Volume Ivory paper. The volume is presented in a plain grey slipcase.

The top of the text block is silvered and the binding is sewn. To Folio Society’s credit, they quickly obliged me with a free replacement, which I have now protected beneath a Mylar dust jacket to avoid a repeat of the incident. My first copy very quickly lost a large patch of its grey colour from the spine. My experience, therefore, is that it is quite prone to rubbing, leaving the white fibres showing through. It’s a small thing, but I find the spine design quite stylish and it looks great on the shelf! A word of warning, though: the cloth seems to have been printed grey rather than dyed. The spine is blocked with the title (in silver foil) and author (in black), all in a capitalis quadrata style face. It looks nicer in person than in photographs. The binding is in grey cloth, with a blocked cover design by the illustrator that is embellished with silver foil. The front and back boards are particularly rigid, which further contributes to the sense of robustness. The book, although quite slender, feels incredibly dense, giving it a solid, well-made feel. At the end of the article I will briefly mention a couple of other interesting editions of this work. Here, I’ll be looking primarily at the fine edition of Candide published by the Folio Society in 2015. In this respect, Voltaire’s satirical masterpiece, Candide, is both devastating and hilarious. And all embody the principle that mockery is the best foil for assaults on common decency. All uphold the best possible tradition of satire: the notion that nobody and nothing should be above reproach. It may be sacrilege, but I think one can trace a direct lineage from Voltaire’s 1759 Candide to modern cultural phenomena such as the popular TV show South Park or Voltaire’s modern day compatriots at Charlie Hebdo.

The pen is mightier than the sword, exhibit A.įolio Society 2015 203pp 8to (255x195x25mm) 1kg bound in blocked grey cloth in plain grey slipcase colour and black and white illustrations throughout.

Candide book cover