The Edition
Four expressions of Paradise Lost, each containing Milton’s complete text and all twelve drawings by Brittney Landers—distinguished by materials, binding, presentation, signatures, numbering, and original art.
Prices will be announced soon.
Milton’s complete 1674 text with all twelve drawings by Brittney Landers, made as the most direct way into the work.
A complete illustrated edition for reading, returning to, and sharing.
The first printing will be released in a limited run.
The same complete text and all twelve drawings, given greater presence through its paper, binding, and slipcase.
A more immersive expression of the encounter between Milton’s poem and Brittney’s art.
The first printing will be released in a limited run.
Four hundred numbered and artist-signed copies, hand-bound as two volumes in black and deep forest-green cloth.
Each set has a lined slipcase in pure black woven bookcloth, with a recessed graphite or dark-silver foil-debossed title. Sets 399 and 400 retain their community and reader purposes.
Subscribers receive a private early-access window before remaining copies are released publicly.
Twenty-six lettered copies in full black and deep-green goatskin, each carrying an original work by Brittney Landers.
Each set has a fitted clamshell in pure black woven bookcloth, with a recessed graphite or dark-silver foil-debossed title.
Available by private invitation.
The mailing list
Join the Tenet Press mailing list to follow the craft of fine bookmaking and the journey from Milton’s poem through Brittney Landers’s drawings to the finished books.
Each month, we share new art, glimpses of the making, and stories from inside the press.
Mailing-list subscribers receive early access to limited, numbered, and signed editions before they are offered publicly.
You’re on the Paradise Lost list.
We’ll write when there is new work to share.
Long is the wayAnd hard, that out of Hell leads up to Light
A work vastenough for doubt.
We are proud to announce our first title: Paradise Lost by John Milton, interpreted and complemented by the art of Brittney Landers.
Milton composed Paradise Lost after losing his sight. In the scale of an epic, the poem confronts freedom, ambition, obedience, and the cost of choice.
Why Paradise Lost
Why this poem comes first.
Paradise Lost was the first poem to teach me that extraordinary poetry did not need to rhyme. Milton’s ambition, moral complexity, and command of English still feel vast.
Milton gave the devil his due: not a simple enemy, but a powerful and tragic mind making an argument against Heaven. He also enlarged the language available to those who followed him; the Oxford English Dictionary records him as the earliest known user of hundreds of words and meanings now embedded in common speech.
Blind when he composed the poem, Milton held lines in memory until someone could take them down, then revised them as they were read back. This edition uses the 1674 arrangement, pairs it with twelve new pen-and-ink drawings, and gives the verse room to be read a page at a time.
The Art
Twelve drawings.Twenty-six originals.
Brittney Landers is making twelve black pen-and-ink drawings for the book, one for each Book of Milton’s poem. Six appear in each volume, printed in black on cream paper.
She is also making twenty-six one-of-one works, one for each Empyrean Edition set.
Art by
Brittney Landers
Brittney Landers works as Saphorial. For Paradise Lost, she is making twelve original drawings in pen and ink—one for each Book of Milton’s poem.
The first finished drawing will be shown here before reservations open. The rest will appear slowly, alongside proofs and the making of the books.
Join the ListNo light, but rather darkness visible
The Work
Twelve books.One disobedience.
Milton was blind when he composed the poem, dictating it to whoever could take it down. By publication he was politically defeated and had survived arrest and imprisonment. He was paid five pounds for it, with five more promised once the first impression sold.
Ten books appeared in 1667. Seven years later he arranged them into twelve — ten thousand five hundred and sixty-five lines of unrhymed verse, which he defended to the reader as ancient liberty recovered.
It is the last poem in English to attempt everything at once: a cosmology, a politics, a theology, and an argument about the price of choosing.
The 1674 arrangement is the text set here.
Paradise Lost was the first work to teach me that extraordinary poetry did not need to rhyme. It also gave the devil his due: not a simple enemy bent on destruction, but a powerful and tragic mind making an argument against Heaven. I could not escape its pull as the first work of this press.
Better to reign in Hell, than serve in Heav’n