XXXIV/4 Paradoxically, of all the images used (and there were many false starts and rejects) this was the first to be drawn when preparing the initial artwork for the version started in 1978. It had escaped the fire that engulfed all the early studies by having been kept at home (since it would not have been needed until towards the end of the printing). Up to the reworking in 1983, it consisted only of the interior text and some of the stars with a blank in the middle intended for a handwritten section of Dante's text: this has now been replaced by a schematised shape which combines the shape of the book with a stylised world/hell/purgatory configuration containing a recapitulation of the principal images in the work, using a collage constructed from many of the plates. Below is a much less severely stylised book, opening in imitation of the rays of the sun. The binding imitates the standard binding of the Inferno, with some artistic license used in the representation of the spine. Like the interior text it prefigures the volumes to come. The book thus ends, as do all three books of the Comedy, with stars. The book has as its final image the circular 'signature' of the Talfourd Press, reproduced from the original mezzotint. -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.