Back Matter and Front
(and everything in between)
6/25/09
We have now completed a solid draft of art placements for The Fairies’ Parliament and thus for the novel as a whole.
A number of things remain to be done. The following list may seem long, but in fact compared to what we’ve already accomplished the remaining tasks are relatively straightforward and few in number; it should all go relatively quickly (emphasis throughout on the word relatively).
First comes the back matter. Following the novel there are four textual objects in the Lettered and Numbered Editions; of these four, the latter three will also be included in the Trade Edition. Two of the four texts require final readings and possibly the selection of a small number of art details to go with them. The remaining two texts still need to be created, which by their nature must be done last — a bibliographic listing of the sources of the art and a colophon.
Next is the front matter. John D. Berry’s approach to book design — his central tenet — is that you design a book from the middle outward. The front matter and dust jacket are among the final things you design. Not working under the same constraints as the inimitable John Berry, I chose art for the front matter at the very beginning of my work on the art for the book as a whole, and I’m glad to report that lo these many months later most of those art choices still seem appropriate, though the form they will take has shifted and the form of their presentation awaits Berry’s design work.
After that we will burn the entire novel onto a couple of CD-ROMs and send them to John Crowley and Peter Milton. We are allowing a single week for the four of us to review the entire book and all the art in it to decide on final changes to the art selections. Once John and Peter’s feedback is in hand John D. Berry and I will make a final pass through the book as a whole, to settle and lock everything into place. There will be no further reading of the text beyond spot-reading around areas of correction or massage. This final pass will be to input the last text corrections, already gathered, and to finalize the art, and to massage the text so that it flows around the art as artfully as possible. Finalizing the art will include changing some of it — deleting some images, adding a few new ones, and replacing some images with others. This should affect less than 10% of the art. Many of the changes are already known quantities and any remaining changes will have been determined by the time we finish our review, and so will simply need to be implemented as we make that final pass.
Finally we will put the endleaves into place: all three editions will include printed endleaves featuring two pieces of art (one on the front inside sheet, one on the back) and the family tree on the inside of both the front and back boards. Then we finalize the design for the dust jackets (which will be largely the same for all three editions), the cloth choices and stamps for the boards and slipcases, and then finally and at long last we bundle the whole kit and kaboodle off to the printer.
A long list, to be sure. I know that in the past my predictions as to when we would complete production work have been consistently too optimistic. But now that the creative part of the design process (which for me was full of flickering dreamlight and fraught with unknowns) is all but finished, and with the large majority of the remaining tasks being more daylit in nature, I am confident that we will conclude production with alacrity and in relatively short order: our goal is to have the book ready for the printer by July’s end.
Thank you again for your extraordinary encouragement and support during this long, often difficult, intermittently joyous, process.
Best Wishes,
Ron Drummond
Publisher