Description from Amaranthine Books website

The Portrait Edition is our ultimate edition of The Picture of Dorian Gray. Oversized and limited to only 26 lettered and signed copies, it is packed with numerous features that elevate its status far beyond that of a mere book. This approach allowed us to achieve our main goal with this edition—to turn the book into a piece of art.

Creative concept for this edition revolves around Dorian’s degradation, which is driven by his bad decisions and indulging lifestyle. Therefore, the front cover features his portrait printed on painting canvas with Dorian elements made via lenticular printing to produce the effect of an ageing and rotting Dorian. This way he is constantly shifting and changing depending on where you stand, going from young and beautiful, over old and deteriorated, all the way to rotten and spoiled. The transitions are made to be fluent and subtle, in order to build upon the portrait and not to take away from it.

Once you open the book, you are met with handmade marbled endpapers made by the legendary Freya Scott, who has crafted these specially for this edition. The goal was to create something extravagant and worthy of Dorian’s name and her creation bridges the covers and the art inside perfectly. When you flip the first page to reach the title, you will notice it is written by hand in shimmering ink, which causes numerous colours to be visible, depending on the light and whatever pigments were picked up by the pen.

As you go through the story, you will encounter numerous things that emphasise Dorian’s fall from grace: illustrated drop caps are rotting away with each chapter and each illustration represents a moment of Dorian’s degradation; a moment where his decisions ate away at his soul. And when you need a break from reading, you can mark where you left off with a bookmark in a shape of Dorian’s silver mirror. All the illustrations, including the front cover, and the bookmark were done by the extremely talented Vedran Klemens

Since Dorian is quite fond of attention, it only made sense to design something that will allow him to be put on display for everyone to admire. Therefore, this edition comes in a custom designed case which is both a book case and picture frame at the same time. It allows you to place the book neatly inside it and hang it on the wall (or lean it next to one).

As previously mentioned, the whole run has only 26 lettered copies, with a few additional copies marked with roman numerals for the key participants of the projects, making this a true rarity.

You can see more pictures of the book and the illustrations in our gallery.