Doré Magnified

A thoroughly illustrated Doré Bible for smaller formats

Our newest concept, the Doré Magnified, is a celebration of the beloved wood engravings of Gustave Doré, originally created for “La Grande Bible de Tours” first published in 1866. As the name suggests, this was a large Bible, around 16” tall with plenty of space to showcase the astonishingly detailed 241 full page illustrations.

The Doré artwork has been used in plenty of Bible editions ever since, but most of these (with at least one notable exception in The Cambridge Family Chronicle Bible) has not compared favourably to the original editions, partly due to the deterioration of the original artworks, which was used again and again for reprints, and also due to the fact that most of the modern day Bibles has been printed in much smaller formats than “La Grande Bible de Tours.”

Another “problem” from a modern day perspective is the distribution of the artwork. Of the 241 illustrations 135 are found in Genesis, Exodus, the Apocrypha and the Gospels and Acts leaving only 44% of the illustrations for the rest 75% of the Bible. There are only 20 illustrations in the canonical Old Testament after the Book of Esther and only one illustration between Acts and Revelations.

The Doré Magnified concept solves both problems:
All illustrations are magnified and cropped to focus on key elements of the art in all of its magnificent detail and different parts of the illustrations has been repurposed in related of different contexts for a more even distribution of the artwork. This also gave us the chance to include some of the lesser known illustrations originally made for the apocryphal books. This concept includes 279 full or half page illustrations and 29 vignettes.