For The Divine Comedy, both John and I read the Bollingen Series Edition, published by Princeton University, from the gates of hell to the divine light of heaven. The Comedy stands out among program books in terms of variety. There are probably six or seven accepted translations, nearly all of them published with a facing-page Italian to go with the English translation. This prose translation is done by Charles S. Singleton, a famous Dante scholar. His translation is described, weirdly, on the back cover of Inferno as being "much the most satisfactory one I know." I had already bought the book when I noticed this ringing endorsement, leaving me mostly baffled with my choice.
What originally drew me to the book was the professional cover design, and the fact that Singleton's extensive commentary was sequestered in a separate volume, leaving me with a text unencumbered by the bulk that such a thorough commentary would bring (I ended up checking out the commentaries from the school library). This commentary, however, would probably be the main reason to invest in the Bollingen series. For my purposes, it was too much - I did not have the time to read 600+ pages of commentary for each book. But for anyone doing a close study, this edition seems the way to go. My comment that the book appears "scholarly" is more than just an artifice. At one point, the texts and commentaries were available together, but these editions are now out of print.
That said, there was some sloppy cover design that kept me from being confident that I had selected the right book. The three books all share the same conceptual design of a gray field with white serif text and white border. The books are differentiated primarily by the color of the bar (which extends, broken by the white border, to the spine and back cover). As Roger's post indicated, differentiating the books through color seems a precarious undertaking, although I think both Inferno and Paradiso were colored in a way that conveyed the mood of the book I was reading - the guiding principle of all good cover art. For Purgatorio, I wasn't so certain, but I don't know what color I would suggest in the place of the purple they chose.
The major issue in the cover design, though, does not fully reveal itself until you place these books on a bookshelf (or lay them out side by side, as pictured above). The two glaring issues are clear:
1) The tone of gray darkens as you move through the books.
2) The colored bars are not evenly aligned.
Both of these mistakes are inexplicable. I could possibly understand the uneven alignment of the bars if they ascended from Inferno to Paradiso, in some way symbolizing the ascent Dante himself makes. But they don't. Purgatorio stands conspicuously above the rest. The darkening gray makes even less sense. These are unfortunate consistencies in what I think is, conceptually, an excellent cover design. I'm not familiar with any other books in the Bollingen Series, but I think Princeton, like all publishers with such high academic standing, puts out good-looking academic works. It's an unfortunate blight.
The font that appears on the front is the same one for the text throughout, and I had some trouble with it. It's a little flat, and the thickness makes reading difficult on the eyes. Also, there were parts of the text with faded printings - another sign of sloppiness in the overall publication. I did think the text was well arranged, giving copious note-taking space, and the English followed the Italian so closely that cross-referencing across the page was a breeze.
The decision I made is not one I regret, as the other editions all had equal faults. It's just disappointing that some better design oversight might have made this an edition to savor.
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