Suppose One Were a Fish
Little, Big 25 Production Update #2
For Immediate Release: Friday, 24 August 2007
The farther in we go, the bigger it gets. In June book designer John D. Berry and I spent two days at the Stinehour Press in the beautiful farm country of northeastern Vermont, working with their team of experts on a print test to calibrate the art reproductions for the new edition of Little, Big. Given the subtle detail and the delicacy of the balance between light and shade in Peter Milton’s art, we are keen to insure that it receive the finest reproductions possible; hence the test.
Milton had kindly sent an original print of “Time with Celia” (the front cover art for our edition) to Stinehour on loan so we could use it as a point of comparison. Nominally black and white, Milton’s art is in fact filled with myriad gradations of grey, and in the two-color process being used to print the book’s interior art, the crucial question was precisely which shade of grey to use in combination with black to achieve the most efficacious reproductions on the silken-smooth uncoated textures of the off-white Mohawk Superfine paper we’re using for the book. Since the cost of the test was not inconsiderable, we decided to design it to be an art object in its own right, suitable for distribution (the thumbnail leads to a medium-definition 1.5Mb PDF of it, and copies are now available for purchase).
Prepress manager John Stinehour’s keen eye quickly identified an appropriate shade of grey with which to begin, and over the course of our second morning several tests were run through the giant presses on which the whole of Little, Big will soon be printed. The results of each test were compared to Milton’s print and the shade of the grey carefully adjusted for the next pass through the presses. On the fourth run we had a very close match, and on that basis decided to let the presses rip, running off 500 copies of the poster.
The next morning John Berry and I drove to south central New Hampshire, where we had lunch with Peter and Edith Milton at their beautiful 19th century country home, an Edgewood in miniature; they are the most delightful of hosts. Here was the real test, and Peter openly admired our results, giving us an unambiguous thumb’s up on the poster’s art reproductions. What a relief! In the late afternoon we drove on, angling southwest across lower New Hampshire and then down I-91 into central Massachusetts and the heart of Crowley Country. The Parliamentarian of Faery was well pleased with our treatment of “Suppose One Were a Fish” and the Milton gallery that orbits it, and we all celebrated over dinner at a fine local establishment.
Much of July was spent in acquiring the last of the art in a digital form suitable for book production purposes. This was a fairly elaborate, time-consuming process, involving many people, which eventually had digital scans and new digital photographs of Milton’s art winging their way to us from San Diego, Seattle, and from all over the northeast. As a result, we now have a library of over 200 Milton images to work with.
After seven months the editorial work on the book is now in its final stages. The process included a thorough edit (to an extent the novel had never received before), consultations with the original handwritten manuscript, the penultimate typescript, and the last round of editorial changes made to the book by Bantam’s copyeditors prior to its first publication. Over the last month I’ve been sending my accumulated editorial queries to John Crowley, who has been approving and vetoing changes (including the reinstatement of word-choices and clauses and whole sentences cut from the novel by Bantam’s copyeditors a quarter-century ago) and generating his own changes in a positively thrilling back-and-forth that is proving to be the most exciting editorial experience of my life, one in which the novel is being brought distinctly closer to its own ideal form. Make no mistake: The 25th Anniversary Edition will be the definitive and final author-approved text of Little, Big.
With the text finalized and the book’s design templates now in place, over the next month I’ll be reading the novel yet again, this time with my eye and ear wholly tuned to matching specific images (most of which will be in the form of details from larger works) from Milton’s art to specific passages in the book, so that book designer John D. Berry can settle them elegantly into place. John Crowley and Peter Milton will be advising. In the end, we will be including between 100 and 150 art reproductions in the edition.
Our new print deadline is the first half of November.
Best Wishes,
Ron Drummond
Editor and Publisher