William Makepeace Thackeray

The Four Corners Familiars series invites contemporary artists to illustrate and produce a new edition of a classic novel or short story. This magnificent edition of William Makepeace Thackeray's Vanity Fair (first published in 1847-48) is the sixth in this series, and is produced by the British artist Donald Urquhart. Urquhart's black-and-white drawing style and subject matter is perfectly suited to the themes of Vanity Fair, which follows the fortunes of its strong-minded and strong-willed anti-heroine Becky Sharp through the follies and hypocrisies of early nineteenth-century British society. Urquhart's drawings, inspired by the fashions and iconography of 1930s Hollywood, focus exclusively on Becky Sharp. "I wanted to sideline all the secondary characters," says Urquhart. The novel is newly typeset in Perpetua and Felicity (partly chosen for their feminine names), typefaces designed by Eric Gill.