This book constitutes a recording of the Dante's Inferno layout, the paper to be used for the printed text, a listing of subscribers, and initial comments on the iconography for each canto. The lists of subscribers to the publication and financial payments are charted for each canto as the galleys were completed. A description of the illustrations for each canto and Justification de Tirage are written in two versions. In July 1982, in his prelude to this text, Phillips recalled finding a lavish, red, gilded edition of Dante's Inferno illustrated by Gustave Dore while collecting books for pulping for the World War II effort. It was one of the grandest books he had ever seen and stayed in his house for a while before it was taken to the depot. Phillips writes, "I learned how early one's destiny can be sealed or at least signposted...Actually before I knew this [story] I had already from reprints recycled many of Dore's illustrations in quite another way." Enclosed between several pages of this book are 12 printed fragments which Phillips has torn from the magazine, "Boys Own Paper," as well as Dore reprints and "A Human Document."Tom Phillips' detailed text in this volume of Commentaries is the basis for the "Iconographical notes and commentary on the illustrations" in the final section of the Thames and Hudson publication of the Inferno. Phillips intended that his illustrations should give a visual commentary to the Dante's texts. As he writes in his notebook, "The range of imagery matches Dante in breath encompassing everything from Greek mythology to the Berlin Wall, from scriptural reference to a scene in an abatoir, and from alchemical signs to lavatory graffiti. And the range of modes of expression is similarly wide, including as it does, early calligraphy, collage, golden section drawings, maps, dragons, doctored photographs, references to other past artworks and specially programmed computer generated graphics...I have tried in this present version of Dante's Inferno which I have translated and illustrated to make the book a container for the energy usually expended on large scale paintings...The artist thus tries to reveal the artist in the poet and the poet helps to uncover/release the poet in the artist."This book which was bound by Pella Erskine-Tulloch includes one small abstract ink drawing. -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.