"I Owe The Villain An Apology" Unisex Longsleeve T-shirt

The pages are blank. An old book lies open, drawn in grey and off-white stipple like a plate from an engraved catalogue, with a worn dark cover and one leaf curling up at the lower right, and nobody has written a word in it yet. A pencil rests in the gutter with its point toward the reader, a strip of cloth knotted near the eraser end. A torn scrap of paper patterned with small leafy sprigs pokes out from behind the spine.

Everything around that empty spread is loud. I Owe the Villain an Apology runs in three lines of heavy cream blackletter, the first two cut out on ragged pieces of black paper as if pasted from a ransom note. Villain is the biggest word, slanted and dropping its letters over the top of the book. On this long sleeve T-shirt the last two words land on a deep red torn strip that tilts upward, held at its left end by a small metal paperclip. The joke is one most readers know: you finish the story, the bad guy had a point, and the apology is still unwritten. It suits anyone who reads for the antagonist, and it makes an easy gift for a book club friend.

• Thin scrollwork is drawn inside the strokes of the initial I and the V.
• The word the is smaller than its neighbours and leans on a scrap of its own.
• The colours stay with cream, black, engraving grey and a single dark red.