Well, the last few weeks have certainly flown by! Personally, it’s been rather hectic due to a very long and drawn out process of buying a new house. We sold ours back in June last year and due to every conceivable delay you can think of, we’re still not in new one. However, we’ve been given a provisional date at the end of the month, so I have been working and packing, packing and working, parenting and packing, working, then packing, and some husbanding for good measure.
Quite a lot to mention since the last blog post! Before They are Hanged is currently midway through shipping at the moment. As mentioned previously we’re testing a different distributor for the Standard Edition this time round as we really want to bring down the shipping and packing costs of our books for those overseas.
Whilst the distributor received the books a couple of weeks ago, it’s been delayed going out for a couple of reasons. Our boxes hadn’t arrived on time, and the distributor have spent a week checking each copy thoroughly. I also visited in person today to ensure they know what’s good to go out and what isn’t. This pushed back delivery, but it’s a great sign from the company that they want to get it right for CK collectors.
We’ll see how things go on this run and make a decision on the shipper for future releases. I have passed on all savings from the new distributor’s fees to the customer, as I have never felt comfortable with the prices we’ve had to charge previously.
Prints
The amazing John Anthony di Giovanni has finished signing his cover prints for The Fifth Season, and they should be with me next week ready for ordering! John did an incredible job of what was a very difficult brief for the dustjacket of TFS. As it turns out, drawing a wide angle epic scene of characters that are effectively living in a giant geode/crystal makes the lighting of the painting quite the challenge – but he certainly pulled it out the bag!
We’re doing a run of 75 signed and numbered copies of these on the beautiful Hahnemuhle 310gsm cotton rag we used on our first print. The price is the same too at £110 plus packaging.
Not only that, while I have been digging through my garage and packing things up for the new place, I found a few goodies I had forgotten about!
Through my rummaging I found 26 signed, pristine giclee prints of Susan Jaekel’s repainted “Adventure” cover from the Atari 2600. These prints were printed at the wrong size and so didn’t fit in the portfolio that came with the RPO rebind, so we had them done again at the right size. So I’m thinking of putting these up on the site for people to buy – they are roughly A4 in size and printed on 240gsm Epsom Pearl.
Before They are Hanged
As mentioned above we are shipping! Standard Editions to leave the distributor on Wednesday this week, so will start landing on doorsteps soon. The Deluxes are already being shipped in batches by Ludlow, and will be out the door during the coming week. The Lettereds are also nearly finished and scheduled to ship out at the end of the coming week too!
From what I can tell it looks like we have very few copies leftover. I still can’t say for sure yet, but maybe 2 or 3 Standard Editions, and maybe 1 Deluxe Edition and 1 Lettered Edition. I still haven’t set a date for the sale of these and should know for sure the numbers next week. I’ll then send out a note via newsletter as to the when.
Legend
We’re making good progress with Legend at the moment after some delays at the printers, which I can only apologise for. Phil and Robert from Hand & Eye have these on the Heidleberg and are whizzing through the pages – a few pictures below for your perusal. All being well, the sheets should be with the binder by late March for the binding process.
Then it’s up to Ludlow to go through the motions of preparing the sheets for binding. Folding, gathering, arranging tip ins, etc etc.
We’re still waiting on the last colours from Justin Sweet the artist which we’ve been told should dovetail nicely with binding, but watch this space!
Both the contributors Stella Graham and Mark Lawrence have written wonderful words for the foreword and afterword. They will also be signing the limitation pages alongside Justin.
Shipping is looking like June for all tiers out the door. There will also be a few copies of the Standard and Deluxe going up on the website once shipping has commenced, and will keep people posted when the time is right.
The Fall of Hyperion
The interiors are all finished, proofed and ready for plate making! We’re using Nomad Letterpress for this one as they printed Hyperion and we wanted to keep the same team. Jaime Jones the artist has outdone himself once again and is well underway on the colours ahead of time.
Once the plates are ready we’ll have a good idea of when Pat and Ellen can get them on the press, and could be on and printing in late Spring. With that in mind, we may be shipping these around Autumn time. We’ll keep you posted each month as usual.
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
The exciting news is Gary Gianni and Marcelo Anciano have finished the interiors for the book and they are absolutely brilliant. What a stunning job they have done and to my mind, the best layout of THGTTG done to date.
We’re currently lining up the offset printer for the colour paintings and vignette’s on the pages, and once that’s done it goes across to Hand & Eye Letterpress for two colour printing of the text and chapter headings. No expense spared on this edition!
Oh, and you know I said that there wasn’t going to be a dustjacket for the Standard Edition? Well that was a big fat lie… Following the amount of work Gary had been doing on this project I just didn’t think it feasible to have a dustjacket done as well. Also I thought the Standard came out so well it didn’t need one.
Anyway, it turns out that Gary did a little sketch for a potential dustjacket/endpaper that he shared with me a couple of weeks back… Any ideas what I decided to do after hearing he’d done a sketch, and then saw it?
Yep. I dug into the coffers and asked if he would paint it full size for the book (who needs profit anyway). I mean, I had to right? Whether I use it as a dustjacket or an endpaper I’m still not sure yet – it’s absolutely perfect as a dustjacket, but it would also fit perfectly as an endpaper.
Currently planned for shipping in Q4, but will become clearer as time goes on!
Last Argument of Kings
We’ve been itching to reveal the details of our production of LAOK by Joe Abecrombie and illustrated by Greg Manchess for some time now, and it’s on the horizon as BTAH is currently shipping.
Based upon what I’ve been told about the final copies going out the door, it looks like we’ll be doing the reveal on Tuesday 4th March at 15:00GMT. This includes the full write up and the images of the prototype books and the third and final dustjacket of The First Law series.
The rights holder period will open up immediately following the reveal, and the relevant people will be contacted via email to take up their matching copy should they wish to. Any copies not claimed will be put up on the website for public pre-order on March 11th 20:00 GMT.
This is a huge book at 560 pages and over 60 pages with a second colour, and we’ve kept the (admittedly very expensive paper) to match the first two. There is a slight increase in price point sadly as due to the ever increasing material and labour costs, not to mention this book is 30% bigger than TBI. Which means 30% more paper, printing, and binding labour etc.
Just to reiterate a few frequent questions regarding future Abercrombie works. Yes we are planning to move straight to the Standalone’s, and owners of Abercrombie series rights will be able to purchase prior to any public pre-order. We are also looking at increasing the amount of Deluxe and Standard editions starting with Best Served Cold.
