70. The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton, with photographs by Stephen Shore

About The Age of Innocence and the Arion Press edition

A classic of American literature, The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton is considered the finest novel by Wharton, America's most important woman of letters during the early twentieth century. The Age of Innocence has a special status as affectionate record of the streets and buildings of New York City. Its story of Old New York is firmly placed in the physical city as the author knew it when she was growing up there in the 1870s and 1880s. At every moment of the novel the reader knows where the characters are, walking down a particular street, standing in front of a certain address, looking out the window of a familiar room. Her feeling for "place" is one of Wharton's distinctive strengths as a novelist, according to her biographer R. W. B. Lewis, who writes of The Age of Innocence, "The exploitation of place as a basic fictional resource was something Edith Wharton had learned from James and admired in Proust, and in none of her novels is this mastery more striking."

For this reason, Arion Press decided to illustrate Edith Wharton's great novel of New York with images of its actual setting, as they are today. We engaged the photographer Stephen Shore, who like Wharton spent his childhood in New York, to photograph the locations of the novel as they appear to one walking along the streets of the city, as he did, in June of 2004.

For similar reasons, we commissioned an introduction from Diane Johnson, an American novelist of manners who, like Wharton, writes about her native country from the perspective of a resident of Paris. We are grateful to Sandra S. Phillips, Curator of Photography at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, for introducing us to Stephen Shore and contributing an illuminating commentary on his work for this project.

Stephen Shore is a photographer admired for his abilities to render the American landscape and street. Although his work is seen as following the tradition of Walker Evans, Shore has broken ground in his use of color and, as here, digital photography. He is chair of the photography program at Bard College, where he is Susan Weber Soros Professor in the Arts. He started taking photographs at an early age and, at fourteen, sold four of his works to Edward Steichen, then curator of photography of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. In 1971, Shore became the first living photographer to have a one-man show at that museum. Among the many books of his photographs are: Uncommon Places; The Gardens of Giverny; Andy Warhol's Factory, 1965-1967; American Surfaces; and, most recently, Uncommon Places: The Complete Works, published by Aperture in 2004. He is the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the American Academy in Rome. Shore grew up in New York City and now lives near Rhinecliff, New York, the vicinity of one of Edith Wharton's family estates and key locations in The Age of Innocence. Shore brought to this project a personal knowledge of the historic buildings and streets that made up Wharton's New York world. These include such public places as the Mall in Central Park, the Metropolitan Museum, Grace Church, and the Century Association, as well as the houses and streets where her characters lived: Fifth Avenue, West Twenty-Third Street, West Tenth Street, and Washington Square North. Shore has produced thirty-four color images for The Age of Innocence. Of these, thirty-two appear in the book and an additional two are used on the slipcase and cover.

As Sandra Phillips writes of Shore's photographs for this book: "These are illustrations in the very best sense; they are accompaniments to this wonderful novel by Edith Wharton set in the nineteenth century, and they extend our reading of it imaginatively in the present tense . . . . As she was familiar with the streets and sights of the city, so, too, is he, and appreciative. In these pictures the photographer selects his subjects glancingly ­ a piece of window seen quickly from the corner of the eye, or the details of a doorknob before it is grasped. The photographs seem to be extensions of the man as he walks around the streets comfortably, exploring the city as Wharton would have herself done a century before."

The book has been designed by Andrew Hoyem and produced by Arion Press. The format is octavo, 9-7/8 by 6-7/8 inches, The volume consists of 332 numbered pages, plus 32 unnumbered pages for the illustrations, for a total of 364 pages. The text type, Ronaldson Old Style, has exaggerated serifs that resemble beaks or horns and was chosen for its origin and use during the period of the novel. It was cut in 1884 by MacKellar, Smiths & Jordan and named after James Ronaldson, who with Archibald Binny established a typefoundry in Philadelphia in 1796 that later grew into the MacKellar firm. The Monotype version used for composition of this book did not have a companion italic cut but instead the italic from Modern was borrowed. The title is set in Typo Script, designed by Morris F. Benton for American Type Founders in 1902. The initials at the beginnings of chapters are DeVinne Outline capitals, dating from the same period, though this particular version was cut by Monotype in 1913. The type was printed by letterpress on all cotton mouldmade Velata paper from the Magnani mill in Italy. The photographs were printed in color by offset-lithography on dull-coated Potlatch Vintage paper that has been toned around the pictures to match the color of the text paper. The binding is full cloth over boards, taupe in color, with an inset panel on the round back for a paper label, titling in gold surrounding a small color photograph of an urn with flowers in Central Park. The slipcase has cloth edges top and bottom and is wrapped with a photograph of Central Park.

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