Beat Issue 4
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
Angus Hyland and his team at Pentagram designed Beat IV, a fully illustrated edition of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s epic poem, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner – a gothic, cautionary seafaring tale.
Coleridge is thought to have been inspired to write his metaphysical masterpiece by the tales of the first maritime explorers. The underlying moral of the story is about the power and invisible laws of nature that man disregards at his peril. Whilst today the poem is considered a classic, an archetypal example of early English Romantic literature, when it was first published in 1798 the poem received less than complimentary reviews. Initial sales were put down to sailors, mistakenly thinking it was a book of sea shanties.
The visual power of this poem has, however, proved an enduring inspiration for many artists such as Mervyn Peake, Alexander Calder and David Jones amongst others, with perhaps one of the most well known illustrated versions being Gustav Dore’s engravings of 1870.
In Heart’s approach to the poem a contemporary rendition of a classic has been created, utilising a design inspired by the graphic language of old books.
Beat 4 spans 82 pages, with each illustrator producing a double-page spread to accompany sections of the text. All the Artists had to work with layouts involving various picture plates that they could either work within, outside or through. The cover has been given a dust jacket, patterned with seashells, then ‘defaced’ by cover artist, Jimmy Turrell. The agency branding was kept to a minimum, leaving the Beat masthead to be subtly blind embossed on the front cover.
Beat 4 was selected for the D&AD Annual, Creative Review’s ‘The Annual’ and Design Week’s winner of the Editorial Design category, as well as being featured in Grafik magazine.
