We’re pleased to share Acacia Press’s inaugural edition will be: Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë.

This was not a difficult decision. Some books carry enough weight to hold a press at its beginning. Jane Eyre is one of them.

There is the atmosphere, of course. The sense of enclosure, the long stretches of quiet, the moments where something shifts without warning. But what stays with you is Jane herself. She moves through the novel with a steady sense of judgement, even when the world around her is trying to define her in narrower terms, or degrade her through hardship and comfort. That insistence on self, held without spectacle, still feels current.

For us, it felt like the right place to begin. Jane Eyre continues to ask something of the reader. It doesn’t settle into a single interpretation. It leaves space for opinion by holding tension around class, morality, religion, and autonomy without resolving it neatly.

This edition is being developed as a fully illustrated fine press work. A programme of original paintings and drawings will sit within the text, created specifically for this publication. The book will be printed letterpress, with close attention given to how the pages feel in the hand and how the text is carried across them.

We plan to issue the edition in two states: Numbered and Lettered. Both are being designed with the same care, though each will take a slightly different approach to materials and construction. Binding details are still being finalised, but the intention is to produce a book that holds together as an object, not just as a container for the text.

This first title sets a direction. We are interested in creating books where the physical form helps carry some of the meaning. Where illustration feels like it is developed alongside the text rather than added as an afterthought. Where the work of printers and binders is visible in the final piece.

We’ll share more as the edition takes shape, including details on the artist, materials, and pre-orders.

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