Hand and Eye Press - The Case of Death and Honey by Neil Gaiman

Today via email.

Dear Friends
For the last nine months we have been working on a new imprint with publisher, designer and film maker Marcelo Anciano. Together we are called Areté Editions. We have some exciting books planned, including Neil Gaiman’s The Case of Death and Honey illustrated with forty line drawings by Gary Gianni. There will be three versions.

The Artist’s Edition will be printed on hand made paper and Bradel bound in off-white goatskin with a red leather spine by Richard Tong at Ludlow Bookbinders. Each copy will have an original pen and ink drawing bound into the front board. It will be housed in a solander box that will also include a portfolio of prints, a new introduction by Neil Gaiman separately bound and a copy of our new printing of The Adventure of the Creeping Man, the Conan Doyle story that inspired The Case of Death and Honey. It will be signed by author and artist and the twenty six copies available for purchase will be lettered.

The Numbered Edition will be printed on Zerkall mould paper and full bound in off-white goatskin by Richard Tong at Ludlow Bookbinders. It will be housed in a slip case, signed by author and artist and the 250 copies available for purchase will be numbered.

The Fine Edition will be printed on Mohawk Superfine paper and full bound in red book cloth by Green Street Bindery. We will also have available copies of The Adventure of the Creeping Man bound to match. There will be 500 numbered copies of both for sale, all signed by the artist.

Fuller details will be on our website, www.arete-editions.com, which will be going live at 2 pm BST on Saturday 17 April. We will be offering for pre-order seven copies of the Artist’s Editions and twenty-five of the numbered for a limited period of ten days.


Hand & Eye Editions

The books we have planned for Hand & Eye won’t be affected by this new venture. Final dummies of The Wind in the Willows are expected imminently and we’ll be sending pictures soon. Once they have been photographed prospectuses will be going out and we can get down to the serious business of printing. A Far Away Country is more or less ready to follow and we have other plans that we’re itching move on to. We’ll be telling you more in due course.

Excuse me while I wipe saliva from my chin...

From Marcelo on Facebook:

40 pages of text and 40 full page images, all letterpress, the text is three passes with hot metal type, two in black (the text pages have little images) and once in red. The binding is probably the most expensive project that Rich has done in this field, apart from his one-off books. Rich has designed it with Gary Gianni with the best material he has access to. It is an Art object that Gary has always wanted to do. It is truly gorgeous. Gary doesn’t part with his art very often, so to have 26 full page, very elaborate, original art images come to market is rare.
I’m up to my neck dealing with production at the moment (we are doing another book with Neil with some of his poems) and this came up and I felt that as the web site isn’t up yet, I’d pop in quickly and explain, the web site will explain how we as a group, Ludlow, Hand and Eye, and myself, have been making books for decades and we have come together to make art books.

If only that number of copies is sold then, how / when will the rest be sold? And what about the Fine Edition? Will the prices be mentioned before this starts, will there be photos? I assume one has to react very quickly with so few copies for sale. In such a case, there might well be problems with the website, like there was with Stardust.

I'm very interested in this and have been waiting for it for a while, but right now I'm a bit confused / worried.

>4 SF-72: I admit it's all a bit confusing and I don't really understand the point of this 'pre-order' 10 day period. Why not just make them all available at once? However, there are 500 copies of the Fine edition for sale so I'm sure you'll have a good chance to get one eventually. I'm not even sure how popular this will be as it sounds like it'll be pricey and is only a short story. Interested how you've known about this for a while. It's the first I've heard of it.

ETA: Someone on FB managed to get the pricelist. I'll have a look but likely to give it a miss. These prices for a 40 page book are for REAL Gaiman fans.

Artist’s edition £3200.00
Numbered edition £395.00
Trade Edition £95.00
The Adventure of the Creeping Man £90.00"
Saturday is 7 Artist and 25 Numbered ONLY, everything else will be later.

>5 Levin40:

Thank you very much for your help with my questions.

I heard about it on Librarything in the context of Stardust by Lyra's Books, followed that information up by looking at some tweets that mentioned the project, then registered for the newsletter. Unfortunately, I found that rather confusing, so I appreciate your help and information.

And yes, that's pricey, but I really like Gaiman and really enjoy illustrated and / or special editions of his work. Hopefully it will work out one way or another.

>6 SF-72: Thanks, and good detective work! And yes, they're basically Suntup prices but for a very short book. If it really stands out I might consider the Fine/Trade edition which at least won't break the bank. It'll be interesting to see how well this sells.

>5 Levin40: Thanks for the info and the detective work!. I think the cost might be due to the artist's effort maybe as Phil Abel's books are generally 'reasonably' priced (in relation to the number of pages Vs cost). Will await photographs to assess further.

Well, inside of 5 minutes the 25 numbered copies sold out.

For those interested, shipping to the US is £55.

The artists edition sold out even faster. As soon as the shop was finished loading they were out of stock.

Edit: I don't know why they offered more of the numbered editions that the artists edition.

>10 c_schelle: The Fine editions were out of stock to start with, because they weren’t on sale today. As of right now (2:18 BST) four of the seven artist’s editions that were available for pre-order are still available for purchase

At the moment, 4 Artists editions are still shown as available. But the numbered copies were sold out very quickly. I thought they underestimated how fast that would happen with just 25 copies. I finished payment 4 minutes after 2 and they were already gone.

All that without even photos of the books.

>11 jsg1976: Thanks for the clarification. It seems I have misread the e-mail.

>11 jsg1976: I assume this was really just a test run to make sure their website worked.

I was also very surprised they didn’t have photos of the books posted.

I've loved Gary Gianni's work since 'The Shadow' & 'The MonsterMen' comics back in the '90s. So with 40 illustrations included, this was an easy 'yes' for me. His illustrated editions of 'Twenty-Thousand Leagues Under the Sea' and 'The Call of Cthulhu' are delightful, even if they aren't fine press.

The Artist edition is still available - this is priced beyond me though, much as I'd love to have an edition with original artwork in it.

I believe they also did this to generate some cash flow.

I am really looking forward to it; just based on the description of the numbered, it should be a sight to behold.

Thank you all for your interest in our books, the response had been astounding. To answer some of the points raised here:

We had a short and very limited pre-order now so that we could raise some cash to pay for paper, typesetting and the production of dummies. When we were planning it we had no idea how short it would be! It had to be done without photos because there's nothing to photograph yet. We've been working with Ludlow Bookbinders for some time but there is still a little way to go before we're ready. When we're happy with what we've got we'll be having them photographed professionally, updating our website and reopening the store.

We've set up a mailing list which you can join by clicking the link on our homepage, https://www.arete-editions.com.