I First Started Writing This Story For A Friend Way Back In 2014, At Which Point It Was Just A Couple

I first started writing this story for a friend way back in 2014, at which point it was just a couple thousand words long (and not very good, in all honesty, but I forgive myself). After a dozen revisions and rewrites down the years I finally finished working on it in late 2022. Somewhere along the way it grew to be about 220k words, and it remains to date the largest piece of fiction I've ever completed.

It was always my dearest ambition to try and bind it by hand as a gift, but, you know, time passes. Unfortunately my friend and I fell out of touch around COVID but the characters (a mixture of hers and my own) are still very dear to me and I wanted to make a physical copy to commentate the special place they will always occupy in my heart.

I was aiming for a look similar to Everyman's Library / the style of some 19th century half bindings and I'm pretty happy with the result. Used rather a lot of open source woodcut illustrations for the chapter headers and the title page, and the whole thing is bound in red leather and some 19th century reproduction marble papers.

731 pages and typeset in 10.5pt Crimson Roman