“Ah, distinctly I remember it was in the bleak December;
And each separate dying ember wrought its ghost upon the floor.
Eagerly I wished the morrow;—vainly I had sought to borrow
From my books surcease of sorrow—sorrow for the lost Lenore—
For the rare and radiant maiden whom the angels name Lenore—
Nameless here for evermore.”

Well, here we are back in what I like to call the Edgar Allan Poe season. Invariably blogs and websites trot out stories about the tragic author of so many classic 19th century poems and novels. I suppose that this post falls naturally in that catagory as well.

The other day I ran across an interesting story referencing the wonderful 1884 edition of Poe’s heartbreaking tale The Raven (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1884) illustrated by Gustave Doré . The post reminded me of an account that I read many years ago about the very same edition. Oddly, the blog post failed to mention that Doré died before he had completed the engravings for the book and that many, if not most, were actually the work of other artists. This fact was likely hidden by the publisher at the time since the book was quite expensive in 1884— $10 —equivalent to about $250 today.

This was Doré’s last project before his death on January 23, 1883. His drawings were turned over to Harper & Brothers in New York City, where fourteen master engravers were hired to complete his work and rush the volume to press. The plates had to be cut in steel rather than copper because of the size of the edition: 10,000 copies with 26 engravings each, requiring at least 260,000 full-page sheets to be printed, collated, and bound.

Project Gutenberg has digital editions of the complete Doré edition of “The Raven,” as does the Library of Congress.