Typography lost; or, why excess legibility can impair readability.

I am not a native speaker of English, and I have never read John Milton's Paradise Lost, a book that I have been very keen on reading recently. Being a important classic of the English language I was looking for a more high-end edition that made justice to the importance of the text, and that was somewhat recently published (I am not at the level of spending a premium for very old and rare editions). But no matter what I cannot seem to find any such specimen.

All modern editions and re-printings of Paradise Lost seem to be excessively preoccupied with presenting the text in the most clinical of approaches to legibility. Don't understand me wrong, I do appreciate legibility in a text, but when you take such a epic as Paradise Lost and through editorial decisions render the text in a Arial typeface with a 14 pt spacing between the lines, you just created a barren reading experience.

I suppose several people will strongly disagree with me, that "one should only care for the text itself and disregard the presentation completely", but I would sustain that in texts, specially in poems, not only is the content important but so is the form. That is why reading from a physical book is a very different experience from reading from a cheap and minuscule e-reader that displays too many word breaks. And so, the way a text is arranged, the font that is used and even ornamentations and other decorations are also important as a way of improving the reading experience and, in doing so, fostering the desire to read and re-read books, of increasing the attention of the reader to the text, which could be diffused by the blandness of the way it was being presented, and of respecting the gravitas deserved by those books that have been immortalised in the literature, instead of sharing the same exposition as the homework of a 12 year old kid, written in Microsoft word.

And it only gets worse if you consider how astonishingly beautiful the first edition of Milton's Paradise Lost is (I am not saying anything about the 1730 fourteenth edition that is also illustrated or the 1979 Franklin library edition that contains the works of art that Gustave Doré had made for a 1866 edition).

If anyone has any recommendations for a suitably typographed edition of John Milton's Paradise Lost, I am all ears.