A Year Through the Otherworld: 2027 Gustave Doré Wall Calendar

Front cover of the 2027 Doré wall calendar A Year Through the Otherworld, with Gustave Doré’s engraving of the white rose of Paradise

A Year Through the Otherworld — 2027 Doré Wall Calendar

$38.00

A man stands among the trees. He has lost the road, and the year has only just begun.

Old Heaven’s 2027 calendar follows twelve of Gustave Doré’s wood engravings through Dante’s Divine Comedy: the dark wood, the ferryman, the wind that never rests, the mountain, and the great white rose of Paradise. Each month carries lines from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s translation, with a note on the scene and an Old Heaven reading.

The sequence is our own. July bends beneath a stone; August steps back into the morning air. By December, the solitary figure of January has reached a heaven crowded with light.

Doré gives these places their scale. A cliff occupies most of the world. Two travellers make their way beneath it. Even Paradise is large enough to make a person hesitate.

Hang it somewhere ordinary. There are appointments to keep beneath all those angels.

Inspired by

By the poem’s own reckoning, it is Holy Week of the year 1300 when Dante Alighieri finds himself lost in a dark wood. What follows is a journey down through Hell, up the mountain of Purgatory and out among the stars of Paradise, first with the Roman poet Virgil as his guide, then with Beatrice, and at the last with Saint Bernard.

In the 1860s the French artist Gustave Doré drew that journey, and master engravers cut his designs into wood. Eleven of these twelve plates are reproduced from scans of a Berlin edition of 1870–71 held by the National Library of Poland. April’s Charon comes from a nineteenth-century Cassell edition of Henry Francis Cary’s English translation. We have not redrawn them. Apart from one scanning mark removed from April’s plate, each is reproduced as printed, cropped to its printed border with an even margin of its own paper.

Each month pairs one plate with lines from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s translation and a short note on the scene. The order is ours, not Dante’s: it begins in the wood in January and ends among the stars in December.

Dante began by admitting he was lost. A year can begin the same way. Hang it where you will see it every morning.

What you get

A 14 × 11.5 in wall calendar that opens to 14 × 23 in when hung
Twelve Gustave Doré plates for Dante’s Divine Comedy, one for each month, January–December 2027
Glossy art pages
Matte, writable grid pages
US federal holidays, plus two Dante dates: Dantedì (March 25) and the anniversary of Dante’s death (September 14, 1321)
Spiral bound, with a hanging hole
Printed in the USA by our print partner

Made to order: each calendar is printed after you order it, then ships.

Made with AI assistance, following human aesthetic, mythic and historical direction.