The Fairies’ Parliament
3/24/09
We have completed a solid draft of the art selections and placements for Book Five, The Art of Memory, and are now at work choosing the art for Book Six, The Fairies’ Parliament. Despite recent delays the pace of our progress is accelerating and we are within a curve or three of the final stretch; I hope to have more news before the middle of April.
One thing that I haven’t mentioned before in connection with the art: When we began this project, we figured that the book would include somewhere between seventy and one hundred art reproductions; then as the full scope of the art’s potential for fruitful conversation with the novel and vice versa started to become clear, I began saying that there would be about 150 art reproductions. Now I can report that we have placed well over 200 pieces of art and by the time we finish the book as a whole it should contain about 300 art reproductions in total. What’s astonishing is that none of us feel that the page layouts are becoming crowded, quite the contrary. We have been keen to maintain a good balance and we are all pleased with the results, and hope you will be too.
Book Five held many surprises in terms of the art. On 2/19/09, I sent an update to the email announcement list with this report: “I’m writing now to share an amazing moment that happened yesterday while I was working on the art. Both John Crowley and Peter Milton make extensive use of mirror images and reversals in their work, and in view of that Milton has given me permission to invert details from his art, to use an image both in its true aspect and as if reversed in a mirror, and that in itself has allowed me to explore symmetries in art placements and to thoroughly contour or match the orientation of an image to its physical position in the book, its spatial relation to the text. One of my goals in The Art of Memory has been to find a way to reflect in my art choices both the implications of the mysterious reversal of the Zodiac on the ceiling of Grand Central Station, and the import of the pivotal meeting between Ariel Hawksquill and young Auberon in the gated park, and yesterday, by an unexpected and happenstantial path, I came upon a truly stunning but symmetrically incomplete shape in Milton’s art that suggested to me a way of using it to fulfill that goal, and indeed it does so in ways I never would have guessed were even possible. In the course of a long and difficult project, moments like that are what make it transcendently worthwhile.”
I sent the results of my discovery to Peter Milton, who wrote back, “Man! You are some scary dude for coming up with this,” concluding a few lines later, “Keep up the scary work.” (I was pretty sure Peter meant “scary” in a good way, but decided to write and ask him anyway, as cheerfully as I could, just to be sure — he replied, “Scary is preferred Miltonese for Awesome.”)
A couple of weeks later, on March 4th, the Little, Big Project received an unexpected bit of publicity — in the online edition of The Guardian, one of London’s largest daily newspapers.
Then on March 7th, under the subject header “A mansion of imagery for a mansion of words, and only memory as the medium of reciprocal enfolding,” I wrote again to the email list: “It has slowly dawned on me in recent weeks that Peter Milton’s art, as deployed in the 25th Anniversary Edition of Little, Big, provides the grand architectural spaces, the people, places, and things upon which one might inscribe the text of the novel in order to memorize it, unless of course it's the other way around. Why I didn’t see this sooner I don’t know, except that I did see it sooner, and have been conceptualizing and articulating the relationship between art and text in that light from the very beginning. I just didn’t consciously discover it until the arts of memory, however unconsciously deployed, tricked me into it. Not her but this park; not this park but her.”
More news soon. Thanks again for persevering. We’re almost home!
Best Wishes,
Ron Drummond
Publisher