Garrison Keillor on Little, Big, and other news
12/1/09
Today is John Crowley’s 67th birthday, and that fact was eloquently noted and celebrated by Garrison Keillor on his daily program Writer’s Almanac. You can listen to the segment on Crowley, but be forewarned that the audio file begins playing more or less immediately and there is a brief request for funding support for Keillor's show before the Almanac begins.
In addition, a longer piece on Crowley, including a plug for our new edition of Little, Big, was posted to the Writer’s Almanac website; scroll down.
After John Crowley spent a month going over the (strictly in-house, electronic) uncorrected galleys for the book, in the second half of November he and I had two long phone conferences about the art (the first lasting 80 minutes and the second 70), with our respective computers and the 792-page Little, Big PDF file open before us. This review has been the first time that we’ve been able to look at the book as a whole, and see how all the art fits in and judge the art choices and placements and how they resonate with one another and with the story over the entire length of the novel. John is very pleased with the overall look of the book, as he’s made clear several times, but we both had issues with a few images and image placements and so in our conference calls we discussed changes. Of the 200+ images now in place, we will be deleting anywhere from a dozen to a score of them, moving another handful around, and introducing about as many new images, not all of them in the same places where others are to be cut.
One source of the new images will be Peter Milton’s stunning, just-completed new artwork, Dress Rehearsal. You can view a high-definition copy with the great new “Zoomify” feature on Milton’s website.
John Crowley really loves this piece, and so do I. We are very grateful to Peter Milton for giving us permission to make use of it. We’ll be using possibly as many as seven or eight details taken from various quadrants of the work, placed at several widely-separated points in the novel.
Once the art changes are finished, which should affect no more than ten percent of the art that’s already in place, we’ll create one more rough galley for a quick review, and then book designer and compositor John D. Berry and I will go through the book from beginning to end and input all the final text corrections, text massagings, etc., locking everything into place, and thence hie ye book off to ye printer. It won’t be long.
Speaking of which, the other good news is last week I received the second round of art proofs from our new printer and the reproductions are, in a word, superb. I’m very pleased, and I know you will be too.
Best Wishes,
Ron Drummond
Publisher