It is hardly surprising that Tristram Shandy’s inventive style and distinctive authorial voice have been championed and imitated by writers as varied as Thomas Mann and James Joyce, Salman Rushdie and Friedrich Nietzsche, Karl Marx and Virginia Woolf. The glossary of terms of fortification in the commentary volumeĮverything about Tristram Shandy is unusual: its stream-of-consciousness, conversational style its bizarre chronology, with sentences that start in one volume and are completed in another, and the whole tale ending several years before Tristram has even been born its encyclopaedic range, from moments of high sentiment to the bawdy humour of its laugh-out-loud set-pieces.īut most striking of all is Tristram’s own idiosyncratic presence as author and narrator, as he suggests that readers should skip over pages, attempts to sell the dedication to the highest bidder, opportunistically inserts a preface while his main characters are asleep, and claims to have torn out a whole chapter because it was too well-written and would have overshadowed the rest of his book. Pages from the preface by Patrick Wildgust, curator at Shandy Hall The wide variety of hand-marbled sheets by Jemma Lewis for the tipped in page in Volume III The skull featured in the frontispiece to Volume IX is reputed to be that of Laurence Sterne Frontispiece to Volume VI featuring siege guns sourced from Picture Post magazine
Frontispiece to Volume II with puns quintessential to the illustrations
‘Frontispiece’ using images culled from The Boy’s Own Paper c. The letterpress printed limitation page signed by Tom Phillips RA The burgundy slipcase blocked on one side with metallic foil The blind-blocked binding of the commentary volume Tom Phillips’ design mirrored front and back of the limited edition The limited edition and commentary showing the gold page tops and gold blocking The complementary binding designs by Tom Phillips RA
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