John Crowley - Little, Big 40th Anniversay edn
Please note, this is a very heavy book - shipping outside of the UK will need adjusting.
Little, Big, or The Fairies' Parliament By John Crowley.
The 40th anniversary edition. The author's preferred text, featuring the extraordinary art of Peter Milton, and with a long, previously unpublished essay by Harold Bloom.
It's one of the greatest novels of the 20th Century. It exists at the intersection of Literature and the Fantastic. The beautiful long-awaited 25th Anniversary edition of Little, Big is coming out in time for the 40th Anniversary. The publishing event of the decade is happening. Neil Gaiman, 15 September 2021
John Crowley’s beloved novel Little, Big is without doubt among the greatest works of the imagination created during the last century. In publishing a deluxe, 40th Anniversary Edition of this masterpiece, our goal was twofold: First, we wanted to fulfill the author’s dream of how the book should be presented, by creating an edition that in every respect, from beauty of design to accuracy of text to excellence of manufacture, would reflect all the artistry, insight, imagination, and care that John Crowley poured into every sentence of Little, Big. And second, we wanted to create an edition that fans of the book would cherish, an edition that will be a joy to behold and to read, an edition made to last several lifetimes.
The interior design of the first edition of Little, Big, published by Bantam Books in 1981 (and duplicated in the current HarperCollins edition), is certainly quite striking. Yet its sensibility is late Victorian, whereas Crowley’s design conception for the book has always been art nouveau. Incunabula has brought together the production team of editor Ron Drummond and book designer John D Barry to create, in close consultation with John Crowley, that ideal edition of Little, Big.
It’s an ideal that very much includes art. The 40th Anniversary Edition features superb reproductions of over three hundred details from the drawings, etchings, engravings, and prints of Peter Milton, an artist whom John Crowley feels to be ideally suited to Little, Big. With loving care, we have interwoven Crowley’s words with Milton’s images to create a tapestry full of subtle and surprising resonances, a uniquely revealing concatenation of the work of two modern masters.
The finishing touch comes with a long, ruminative Afterword to Little, Big written especially for the edition by one of the novel’s greatest admirers, Harold Bloom, the Yale humanities professor and bestselling author of The Western Canon and Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human.
Of course, such an embarrassment of riches deserves nothing less than the finest book manufacturing that money can buy. We are confident we have provided just that.
