Fine.
Seen with the eye of faith, Dominic Riley’s elegant semi-abstract cover design, formed of gilt lines, dots and leather onlay, perhaps reveals the image of a seated figure, but the precise contours remain enigmatic. The mystery only deepens on opening the book, revealing gilt tooled almost-words. The solution lies on the reverse calf endpapers, where the tooling of the doublures has been designed intentionally to offset and reveal that it is in-fact mirror writing, the text taken from Richard Barnfield’s Sonnet 11:
‘He open’d it: and taking off the couer
He straight perceau’d himselfe to be my Louer.’
Barnfield is one of the great forgotten poets, a significant influence on Shakespeare and one of only a handful of Englishmen to publish same-sex love poetry until the 20th century. In Sonnet 11, a lamenting poem of unrequited love, Barnfield’s narrator uses a mirror to reveal to his unexpecting male companion that it is in-fact he who is the object of affection.
Dominic Riley’s binding cunningly reflects Barnfield’s device of the mirror, while also movingly reminding the viewer of the necessity for marginalised groups throughout history to speak through coded language. Indeed, while little is known of Barnfield’s later life, his sudden disappearance from the historical record suggests that he may have suffered for daring to speak too openly of his love.
In the words of Dominic Riley, ‘Barnfield was a ‘gentleman at court’, an admirer and possible rival of Shakespeare. He was the only other male poet of his age other than Shakespeare to write love poems directed at a male muse, in this case the mysterious figure ‘Ganymede’. My inspiration for the design, both the two figures on the cover and the letterforms on the inside, comes from Sonnet XI, (pictured) especially the punch delivered by the last two lines, which when I read them, knocked the breath out of me’
