One occasionally hears it said that, thanks to the internet, all the books truly worth reading are free: Shakespeare, Don Quixote, the stories of Edgar Allan Poe, the Divine Comedy, the Bible. Can it be a coincidence that all of these works inspired illustrations by Gustave Doré? When he was active in mid-nineteenth-century France, he worked in a variety of forms, including painting, sculpture, and even comics and caricatures.

But he lives on through nothing so much as his woodblock-print illustrations of what we now consider classics of Western literature — and, in the case of La Grande Bible de Tours, a text we could describe as “super-canonical.”

Doré took on the task of designing 241 engravings for a luxurious new French-language edition of the Vulgate Bible in the mid-eighteen-sixties. The project “offered him an almost endless series of intensely dramatic events,” writes biographer Joanna Richardson: “the looming tower of Babel, the plague of darkness in Egypt, the death of Samson, Isaiah’s vision of the destruction of Babylon.”

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

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