Portfolio

Letters of Seamen in the Wars with France, 1793–1815

The Boydell Press (2016)
Royal 8vo, 688pp plates

Work carried out: page design and make-up

Letters of seamen below the rank of commissioned officer are rare, both in original form and in print. This edited collection of 255 letters, written by seamen in the British Navy and their correspondents between 1793 and 1815, gives voice to a group of men whose lives and thoughts are otherwise mostly unknown.

It was important to keep the design as simple as possible, as the structure of the letters and their annotations was quite busy already. The titling is in Gill Sans, for clarity and continuity with the back cover, while we allowed ourselves a maritime in-joke by using Bembo for the body text.

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