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From the moment we read the kiddie version of The Sword in the Stone in the Walt Disney Encyclopedia we have been devoted to The Once and Future King by T.H. White. The epic tetralogy consisting of The Sword in the Stone, The Queen of Air and Darkness, The Ill-Made Knight, and The Candle in the Wind remains one of our favorite books: every time we pick it up, we end up rereading our favorite parts. Wart meeting Merlin and Archimedes in the woods. Wart discovering his true identity. Morgause’s horrible children hunting a unicorn. Everything, basically. It is our gold standard for fantasy. We pity those who have not read it.

Our love for TOAFK has guided many of our choices: we took a Medieval English lit course so we could read White’s sources, we bought Roxy Music’s album Avalon because of its title, and we memorized Monty Python and the Holy Grail, our favorite film of the Arthurian tales (along with John Boorman’s Excalibur. We also like Bresson’s Lancelot du Lac, except that the knights’ brightly-colored tights crack us up. There have been some truly crappy adaptations, like that one with Clive Owen).

Whenever we spot a different edition of TOAFK, we buy it. Unfortunately, our existing copies don’t do justice to White’s masterpiece. They’re too plain, the designs are unimaginative, the typefaces are minuscule. They are simply not worthy.

A Book of Hours at Yale’s Beinecke Library. Photo from the Digital Scriptorium.

An edition of The Once and Future King should look like a medieval Book of Hours, hand-painted by the artists commissioned by the Duc de Berry.

The Meeting of Lancelot and Guinevere in The Romance of Lancelot du Lac. Photo from the British Library.

It must be have illuminated pages, leather bindings, locks.

Gilded-edge page. Photo from Wikipedia.

At the very least, it must have gilded-edge pages.

The Folio Society edition, with engravings by John Lawrence

We googled existing designs of TOAFK and found this one from the Folio Society. It’s bound in cloth and prettier than our copies (This is not difficult to achieve). So we’re probably getting this, but if you spot a more worthy edition, let us know.

Famous fans of TOAFK: Charles Xavier and Erik Lehnsherr.