Hamlet

The little compartments you’re seeing on the fronts of all these cards are from a typesetter’s tray that hangs on the wall in my workshop. Back in the days when printers used thousands of pieces of movable type – each piece making an imprint of one letter ­– the little compartments of the tray would hold the letters of the typeface. There was a compartment for As, Bs, and so forth. Now, typesetter’s trays like this one are hipster curio cabinets for excellent tiny objects – I’m no hipster, and so therefore, must have been the one who started it all. Not really – in fact there’s nothing more irritating than hipsters adopting stuff you’ve been doing for years – beards, typesetter’s trays, etc. At any rate, one day I was looking at the tray, with its myriad little treasures, each one still a siren call of fascination to me, when I thought to myself that the little glow-in-the-dark skull (from a complete glow-in-the-dark skeleton I have) would make a great cover for an edition of Hamlet. Everybody knows that Hamlet holds up a skull and says, ‘Alas, poor Yorick. I knew him, [not ‘well,’ but actually] Horatio.’ After I began trying to think of objects for other covers in the canon, I briefly reconsidered using something so obvious, but I didn’t reconsider for long; sometimes, especially with Shakespeare, obvious is good