Since Suntup Editions first burst into the small/fine press world, Paul has brought us some of the most beautiful editions within the modern fine press movement. When he first announced the production of the landmark novel, American Gods, it was clear that this was going to be a special production. Years later, with most of the editions now in the hands of collectors, it is clear that this was worth the wait. While during this time there has been controversy surrounding the author, it does not take away from the energy, creativity and passion that was put into this project from some of the most talented artisans in the fine press world. From the choice of materials and typeface to the newly commissioned artwork, every detail has been crafted to create a whole even greater than its parts. In this conversation, we explore the journey of bringing American Gods to life in a form that is as much an object of art as it is a vessel for story. Paul Suntup   Q: You first announced American Gods  back in November of 2022, but we all know that you have been thinking about this publication for longer than that. Tell us about the inception and evolution of this project and why you think American Gods  is a book that deserves the Suntup treatment?   Numbered Edition of American Gods I had to look back on my emails to see when we first started working on this book. It was in September of 2020. It’s hard to believe. We can work on a book, and during the process, you have a sense of time passing, but not of exactly how much time because you get caught up in everything it takes to keep it moving forward. Then something prompts you to take a look, like this question, and I can’t believe that much time has passed.   As to the inception part of your question, we knew our customers wanted us to publish something by Gaiman, and when it came to identifying the book, I turned to American Gods. It is a fan favorite and an award-winning novel. So, with that baseline, it made a lot of sense. As with many books, this one took on a life of its own. When we started out with it, we had not realized it would evolve into as large of a production as it did.   Q: You brought on some truly incredible collaborators for this production, reaching across the pond for a usual suspect on the lettered binding, but also some new faces including the fine press mainstay Pat Randle for the printing, the endlessly creative Kate Holland to tackle the roman numeral binding, as well as Yoann Lossel and his wonderful artistic flair. How did you select the contributors to this project and what do you think each brings to this publication?   I will have to dust off the memory banks here! Let’s break it down though. Kate on the Roman state. I’ve wanted to work with her for some time but hadn’t found the right project until this came along. What she brings to the table is not only her exceptional bookbinding skills, but also her creativity and resourcefulness.   Jacek on the Lettered. Well, that was an obvious move for us since he’s done a good number of our previous titles which have always been well-received, and his bookmaking talents are impressive to say the least. He brings, like Kate, his creative flair to the binding materials and design, and his finishing is impeccable.   Classic Edition of American Gods As for the printer, well I guess Pat was the only one crazy enough to take on a print job of this size! Over 840 pages printed letterpress across all four states. Pat and the team at Nomad Letterpress have a sterling reputation and very high standards when it comes to fine letterpress printing, so I could trust them completely with this. The paper handling alone was quite the undertaking. We’re talking over 100,000 sheets of paper. This required the assistance of Garry Phipps from Green Street Bindery in Oxford, who was a lifesaver with the paper logistics. He also bound the Classic edition.   Another collaborator not mentioned is Michael Russem, a highly skilled book designer who has designed several of our titles, and who created the interior typographic design. On the art front, we came up with a list of potential artists which we reviewed and then narrowed down, and then we sent our shortlist to Neil for review. He liked Yoann’s work and we reached out. Yoann was very excited to collaborate, and he worked on the art for at least a year, really immersing himself in the project to the extent that he made his own costume for one of the models and took extensive notes during the planning stages. We also did something different with this one. We had Yoann manage the printing of his artwork. Usually, we handle that ourselves, but the art has these gold foil accents and Yoann has a lot of experience with this so we handed the reigns over to him so that he could make sure it was produced to his satisfaction. He worked with his preferred printer and managed the printing process with our direction when needed.   Jacek Tylkowski – Lettered Edition Bookbinder   Q: You have been commissioned for more lettered editions than any other binder since the inception of Suntup Editions, so it is no surprise to me that you were selected to do such an important edition as American Gods . What does this partnership with Suntup mean to you and how did you try to start to wrap your head around this particular story when Paul first presented it to you?   My collaboration with Suntup Editions is very important to me. Now, from the perspective of working with Suntup Editions over the past few years, I have more experience and more thoughts. Of course, I was apprehensive at the beginning, but I guess that's normal when you start something new. Lettered Edition of American Gods Beginning a new relationship with a foreign publishing house was completely different than anything I had done before. Don’t get me wrong, I have been binding books for many, many years, but this work requires a different approach and preparation. I am glad that my work has been so positively received by Paul Suntup and those who follow Suntup Editions, which, I think, influences the fact that I receive more and more new titles for binding. When I was asked to prepare a project for American Gods , I thought it was another big challenge, but as I mentioned, I now have much more experience on edition bindings, so I think it was easier for me to prepare. However, I keep my feet firmly on the ground and I know that nothing lasts forever and appreciate each new project.   Q: As usual, your design is wonderfully elegant and minimalist, executed with an obvious level of talent that speaks to how long you have been honing your craft. Tell us about where you drew your inspiration from with this particular design and how you achieved the beautiful gradient effect on the leather cover. Did having two volumes present any unique challenges?   I think it would be quite a challenge if I had to bind American Gods  in one volume. Two volumes will naturally mean more work, but from a technical perspective it doesn't change much compared to what I was already binding, and I think it was necessary in this case.   I have my routine, especially when I don't know a given title, and that was the case here. I received standard information about the work, plus materials from Paul, which, as always, makes my work on the project easier.   The main inspiration on this binding was the color palette of the artworks, plus specific small elements from them, which I decided to include in the binding. I decided to dye it myself, so I used leather dedicated to this process. I achieved the gradient effect after performing several tests, finding what worked using trial and error. I like discoveries like this when I start something new and have no idea where it will lead me. This has already happened in the past and it is also true now.   Kate Holland – Roman Numeral Edition Bookbinder   Q: This is your first time working with Paul as a contributor to a Suntup Editions release. You are known for creating wonderfully inspired bindings that elevate the text and truly exemplify the idea of “book as art.” What did you find unique about this project that drew you to it since edition bindings are not your typical fare?   I am used to doing individual bindings one at a time but Paul approached me and I was keen to trial having a bit of a production line where there is an element of repetition. I did once do an edition of 100 books though and that nearly killed me so this much smaller run of 15 books, albeit in two volumes, so actually 30 books, was much more appealing.   Roman Numeral Edition of American Gods Q: While most of your projects are singular bindings, commissioned for a specific client or a personal project, is there something particularly challenging or exciting about having to come together with other artists and collaborators to create a singular and coherent vision?   I'd known Pat's (Nomad Press) work, and his dad (Whittington Press) before him, as being exceptional so it was particularly exciting to be working with him and his team. The illustrations are very strong and vibrant so it was important that my binding design didn't detract from or clash with them. The handmade Losin paper is lovely and a joy to bind, though the weight of it and the number of pages the original single volume was incredibly thick, so I managed to persuade Paul to split it into two volumes, doubling my workload, but I hope making for a more enjoyable handling.   Pat Randle – Letterpress Printer   Q: While your work is well known throughout the fine press world from your numerous collaborations with other presses, I believe this is your first time collaborating with Paul. You are printing all four states of this edition, but they vary in some very important ways from one edition to the next. What are some of the unique challenges that you faced when having to print multiple editions of the same book on various papers, different numbers of volumes, and the other aspects of each particular state?   The American Gods  project was technically relatively straightforward (all one colour, plate work, no wood engravings) project, but a huge print job in terms of its size, both page count and size of the edition. We ran 105,000 sheets through the machine, front and back, which presents obvious issues around storage and organisation.   The book had already been designed by Michael Russem over in America, with (I imagine) an American printer in mind. In the UK we exist in a halfway house between the inch and the centimetre. Our machinery is to the inch, but the paper (for this project) is supplied as B2 sized sheets, making a maximum book size of 170 x 245mm. So, the files needed to be resized before converting to plates. The original plan was to have all four editions printed as single volumes but it became apparent as we collated sets of sheets that the bindings on these huge spines would cause too many difficulties, so the conversion to two volumes on three of the editions was made as we went on with the printing.   Losin Paper and Watermark on Roman Numeral Edition Regarding the papers - the “classic” edition needed to fit into one volume and at that size we needed a thin paper with minimal transparency, in the end opting for a lightweight Munken. This is perhaps the edition I am most looking forward to in book format - the Munken is surprisingly strong with a healthy rattle to it. There’s inevitably some transparency from page to page, but I don’t mind this. I like to think the book will have that Bible aura about it. Then the paper for the Roman Numeral edition, a handmade from the Czech Losin mill that we like, took weeks to prepare. They had to get the weight of the paper and one of the long edges consistent enough for us to be able to feed through the Heidelberg at the same time as the three other editions. The paper for the Lettered and Numbered editions, Mohawk and Somerset, were more predictable.    Yoann Lossel - Illustrator   Q:  American Gods  has been a highly anticipated release for Suntup Editions, teased more than a year before announcing, and for such an important project, we know that Paul is very intentional with his choice of illustrators. Tell us about how you were first approached with this potential collaboration and what was your initial reaction to illustrating  American Gods  by Neil Gaiman?   I will always remember the first contact; it was the greatest dilemma of my career! Paul contacted me through Jason Sechrest while I was still engaged for months in the creation of my own art book—a highly demanding art book that I was developing as a concept book, in the logic of William Morris's Kelmscott Press—massively funded via crowdfunding. I had refused all collaborations that had been proposed to me to dedicate myself entirely to it, at least until the end of 2021. In January 2021, I read: "We are currently publishing a signed limited edition of American Gods  by Neil Gaiman. We would be delighted to commission you for this project, bringing you aboard as the illustrator for this edition." As I read the message, my eyes literally lit up; illustrating American Gods  was one of my wildest dreams—my mind still buzzing with the thousands of images that reading the book, fifteen years earlier, had generated—but I needed much more time due to scheduling and personal artistic approach. We are talking about an extra year, which is colossal for a publishing project. I declined the invitation, explaining my dilemma, with a heavy heart; one should not commit without being able to give their best, especially with American Gods .   I did not expect the response that followed. I was offered not only all the necessary time but also artistic freedom. The ideal conditions, a dream within a dream. Immense joy overwhelmed me and at the same time, I immediately grasped the importance of the project and the responsibility it entailed. It's a blend of hyper-focus and excitement that has never left me.   At that same time, I had just finished developing a technique to reproduce the gilding of my originals on my art prints—I am a versatile artist, bibliophile, and lover of book crafts—Paul contacted me right from the start for this dual role of artist and craftsman, with my experience in the field of printing. This promised to be an absolutely fascinating project as I could put all my expertise to the service of the book as an art object. It was the ideal project, under ideal conditions, at the ideal time.   This is what I remember from Paul and his team's working method: they seek to create the best quality, and they are willing to give themselves the means and all the necessary time to achieve it. It is undoubtedly the best collaborative experience of my entire career.   Q: Tell us a little bit about your background and artistic influences. You are famous for your use of graphite and gold leaf combined, which has this wonderfully magical and ominous feel to it, but at other times, your art can be bursting with color and flamboyance, which is clearly on display from the preview art, depicting the chaotic carousel scene in  American Gods . What did you draw from as inspiration and how did you decide on the tone for these illustrations?   I am a lover of art and craftsmanship, it is the common thread of my life. I grew up in a very creative environment that invited me to experiment with sewing, carpentry, theatre, drawing, collage, painting, mechanics... There was no distinction or hierarchy between mediums: each of them nourished my curiosity, quenched my thirst for understanding, and fed my simple pleasure of creating. As a child I was very sensitive, very contemplative, and not very concerned with the social categories in which we compartmentalise concepts. This later led me to read a lot of philosophy, poetry, politics, and social sciences. As a teenager, I embraced an underground culture with all the range of oddities it opened up for me, a mix of Punk, Post-Punk, Dark Folk, Industrial music, Metal, and Psychedelic Rock; while I became passionate about Dark Romanticism, Symbolism, medieval architecture up to Art Nouveau/Jugendstil, through the Italian Renaissance as well as Fantastic Art from Bosch to Beksiński. Gradually, I discovered the Golden Age of illustration, which I started collecting—the pinnacle for a lover of illustrated books—a perfect union of the art and craft trades.   Inevitably, when I discovered William Morris, it was love at first sight. Artistic love and human love. One can break free from categories and make art while making craftsmanship, anchor it in a political logic, and give it an intimately philosophical meaning. American Gods  is the fruit of this journey; the illustrations were created with a pinch of all that.   To address my creative process more specifically: American Gods  is as much a journey through contemporary America as it is a journey through the stories of all the nations that compose it. It's a journey through the history of the Fantastique and Fantasy that brings together folklore, myth, fairy tales, all the great and small stories. It occurred to me to make this contemporary mythological story a visual journey through the history of fantastic art up to the works that have marked American culture more recently. This allowed me to borrow different styles, evoke different feelings with different techniques and achieve a very great diversity of representations. Thus, among the illustrations, there is a tribute or a nod to Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Arnold Böcklin, Edward Robert Hughes, Gustave Doré, Grant Wood, Edward Hopper, Zdzisław Beksiński, Alfons Mucha, Vincent Van Gogh, and Ferdinand Keller.   Along with this artistic research, and very early in the creation process, Paul Suntup entrusted me with choosing the printer and managing the prints for the illustrations, which allowed me to organise my entire creative process and in particular anticipate a subtlety: my work involved from the start the incorporation of gilding work reproducible in print through hot stamping. It is indeed one of the hallmarks of my work and part of my specificity. Alan Lee, the extraordinary English artist, wrote it beautifully in the preface to my book: "Adding decorative detail to the pages can simply provide a beautiful setting or framing to these vivid images, but it can do much more; adding cultural context, extra layers of storytelling and act as an intensifier. Yoann uses his sinuous and coiled linework to feed energy back into his densely shadowed and mysterious paintings."   Each image had to be designed to add this layer of symbolism, this divine dimension evoked by illumination, which suits a work about gods so well. An additional challenge, but also an additional dimension. These gildings allowed me to play with composition, highlight a detail, or add information. This is what allowed me to tell many things in very few images. This was my visual guiding thread.   Q: I know you have poured your heart and soul into each and every one of these illustrations, but is there one in particular that stands out to you as emblematic of the whole project? Do you have a piece that you know you will be looking proudly and fondly upon years from now?   Three illustrations seem emblematic to me, two are particularly interesting, and one has my special affection.   In January 2022, in the middle of the reflection phase, I was enchanted by a work that I had finally seen with my own eyes at the Royal Museum of Fine Arts in Brussels: The Fall of the Rebel Angels. I had long contemplated it, American Gods  already in mind. It is a fantastic, crazy, rich, and timeless work, like what I wanted for the book. But above all, in place of Bruegel's angels, I saw Wednesday, Shadow, Czernobog, and Mr. Nancy in the mad carousel race, surrounded by their multiple strange avatars. I had already thought of parodying Hopper, as an obvious choice, by seating Shadow and Wednesday in his famous diner while giving it all the strangeness of a place set in the otherworld, but this approach of anchoring American Gods  in a classical work only concerned the frontispiece at that time. In a flash, it was possible for me to weave broader connections with fantastic art. The carousel, by invoking Bruegel, has the madness of Flemish works and invited me to extend my reflection to all the illustrations. Not to mention that I loved painting it.   The frontispiece, on the other hand, is a particularly telling witness to the additional layer of symbolism that gilding work can bring. The entire gilded frame surrounding this nod to Hopper is a narrative representation of the book (do not look at it in detail if you have never read American Gods!). There are three different gold leaf colours that compose it: a thread for Shadow's destiny, a thread for the old gods, a thread for the new gods. I have hidden all the important scenes and interactions in chronological order. It starts at the top left and reads counterclockwise to the end of the book. I like the idea that the reader can enjoy wandering through it if they wish. In the centre of the image, by invoking Nighthawks, I was already invoking an imaginary world. By treating it in the manner of an old engraving, nourished by Gustave Doré's work, I gave it a timeless dimension. It only remained to hide a Chevrolet with headlights on, reflecting the Moon in its windshield, to evoke the setting of the final confrontation in the background, to stash posters of 69 Love Songs and Twin Peaks, to reserve a parking space for the buffalo-headed god and a second for Odin, to hide a mysterious man in the shadows and to slightly damage everything. I only had to sprinkle a few scattered bones and rubbish and then install two neon signs that indicate where we are and who is who...   The third illustration, the one that has my affection, is Zorya. Because I see my partner in this image, I particularly enjoyed painting it and it embodies my perfect vision of American Gods .   Paul Suntup   Q: As you directed this project from start to finish, what were some of the most difficult challenges of bringing this production to the finish line and what were the most rewarding aspects of it now that it has been released? What are you most excited for people to experience?   Pretty much every part of this production was a challenge. What comes to mind though is the page count. We did not start out with this being a two-volume edition. But after spending a great deal of time deciding on papers for each state, we made some sample books, and it was obvious that a single volume would not work for three of the four states. So, all but the Classic is being published as two volumes. You just have to be careful with this because it basically doubles the binding cost. But we had no choice. With the heavier-weight papers and the inclusion of the two sequel novellas, it bulked up fast. This is an inherent challenge for all high page count books. We have to balance the desire to create an enhanced reading experience by printing on mouldmade and handmade papers, with the need to keep costs down.   As to the rewarding aspects, I’d have to say the point at which things started to come together after several years of work. That is, when I saw the prototypes for the first time, and when I saw the printing for the first time. Everything up to that point is all “theory,” but when you see the fruits of your labor, there is satisfaction in that.   All Four States of American Gods And lastly, what am I most excited for people to experience? I’d say it’s the production as a whole. It’s the beautiful type design, the papers, the quality of the letterpress printing. And then extending outward to the binding designs, and the materials used. The pleasure of seeing a favorite novel given special treatment, and ultimately, once the books are in people’s hands, the unique reading experience it can offer. We worked hard on this book and I hope our customers enjoy it and have a good experience with it.   This interview was done in a series of communications back and forth with all the contributors and we want to thank them all for their willingness to be a part of this series and their dedication to the process. If you want to stay up to date on what Paul is up to with Suntup Editions then you can follow them at https://suntup.press/  and sign up for their mailing list to get updates on production, future projects and information on artists and binders they work with. You can also follow them on Facebook  to stay up with the monthly releases coming from this groundbreaking press. You can follow the other contributors as well on their socials: Kate Holland - Instagram Jacek Tylkowski - Instagram Yoann Lossel - Instagram Interview by: Zach Harney co-founder of Collectible Book Vault

Greg Manchess Few artists capture the sweep of imagination and the intimacy of human expression quite like Greg Manchess. Over his 50 year career, his work has graced everything from National Geographic and The Smithsonian to bestselling novels and cinematic posters. In addition to his commercial work, he’s celebrated for Above the Timberline, a fully illustrated novel that blends narrative and fine art in groundbreaking ways. In this conversation, we delve into the long and winding path that led him to where he is today, his creative process, and his more recent interactions with the small and fine press communities. We are so excited to finally share this conversation with one of our favorite illustrators and hope you enjoy it as well! Q: You have been a working illustrator for almost 50 years now and the scope of your work is extremely diverse. Can you tell us a little bit about how your journey as an artist began from an early age? Were there any defining moments that shaped your path?   Greg Manchess at his home studio It's actually over 50 years, if you count my years in school. I went to art school thinking that I would get taught how to paint and draw. That makes sense, right? An 18-year-old says, “I'll go to art school, and they'll teach me what to do," but they didn't. What actually happened is I graduated four years later, scratching my head thinking, “I guess I'm going to go look for gallery jobs myself.”   A friend of mine had gotten an art director's job at Better Homes and Gardens in Des Moines, Iowa. She told me that she was working with this place called Hellman Design, and I should check them out. They're a studio in Waterloo, Iowa. So, I went down there, walked in the door, and they had a show on the wall of the six artists that were there. I fell in love with their work right away. It was professional, the kind of drawing I wanted to do, and immediately hoped that they would hire me.   I showed them my portfolio, and I got hired based on my drawing ability, not my finished work, because it was all over the place. I had a lot of pencil and charcoal sketches, pieces from my figure drawing classes. They saw that, and that sold them, because they figured I knew how to draw. At that point, I really didn’t know how to paint yet. They kept pushing me away from paint in art school. They said, “Don't oil paint, because it's dead.” Despite that, I tried anyway on my own, and I got into it. Hellman hired me, but I was the low man on the totem pole, and I had to work hard to live up to what the guys around me could do.   Illustration "Flight Line" My early pieces were just horrible. And I thought, I'm going to get fired any day, because the drawings just fell apart. But I quickly realized, as I watched what the other artists did, that they were working from photography. They were projecting and tracing, whatever it took. And I thought, "I can't do that. I'm a purist, right?" I'm going to do it the “right way.” Quickly, I realized I was not going to be able to build those skills fast enough to keep up. It was going to take years, and I didn't have that time.   So, I promised myself, “All right, if I do this, I'm going to let it teach me how to draw better.” Turns out that is exactly what it did. And I still train my students to do that now, because it accelerates the learning curve, because you're actually following forms and foreshortening forms, and you're understanding foreground and middle ground and background by tracing that stuff. I learned that guys like Vermeer had used lensing and other similar projection methods.   My skills ramped up really fast, to the point where a couple of years later at the studio, I decided to go freelance. They really wanted me to stay. Some days I wish I had, because they were such an amazing group of people. We're still friends, most of us. We had the best leader, Gary Kelly, and he is one of the most-awarded American illustrators of all time and he's brilliant. It was a wonderful start to my career.   Q: You said that you were somewhat pushed away from oil painting, but frankly, I think that is the medium that most people know you for. What eventually drew you towards focusing on the medium, and how did it become your favorite?   Interior Illustrations for Frozen Hell from Arete Editions I held on to my feeling and my dream of wanting to become like those painters I admired, and they happened to all be oil painters. A lot of new illustrators want to be great painters, but when they start they get knocked down, pushed and shoved. I think that what comes into play most is your stamina and how much you stick to it and dig in. At one point in my early career, I'd had enough. At the time, I had eight different techniques I was working with that were all selling. I had colored pencil, gouache, airbrush, regular pencil, charcoal and more. I was often being asked to emulate someone else’s style and eleven years in, I'd had enough. I thought, I'm going to paint for myself and if I fail, then I fail. Then I'll just go off and be a fighter pilot or something if it all falls apart. But the first thing I painted grabbed a lot of attention and pushed me to continue on.   That first piece was a play on Picnic on the Grass  by Manet. It was a bunch of guys sitting around having coffee in a café, but there's a nude sitting at the table. That got a lot of attention. I learned that building curiosity is how you pull the audience in. And then I started to realize that illustrating is about the ideas just as much as the technique. The two have to marry. We see this now with AI. It's only going for the technique. It's not going for the idea. It has to pull from somewhere, and it's an amalgamation of something else.   Q: Being an illustrator that practices so many mediums, I’m curious with such a long spanning career, how you view the evolution of digital art and how that compares to more traditional and historical mediums?   I remember when I realized, ‘wait a minute, there's something happening with the computer scientists, and it is coming to the art world.’ There was one early depiction I saw of a toothpick through an olive in a martini glass that was created by a computer scientist who wasn’t an artist in the traditional sense. It was low-res, but it looked amazing. And I remember thinking, “Yeah, that's where it's headed.” So, I bought a computer in 1981.   I got my first Apple II Plus and I thought that maybe I was going to be a digital artist, or computer artist, as I thought of it then. The trouble was, at the time, the only way to learn how to use it was by reading a large stack of books that taught you the programs. It wasn’t intuitive at all. Every time I would input something, it would just say ‘syntax error.’ I kept working on it, and while I was trying to learn it, a traditional job would come in and I would take it to survive. Illustrations for Sleepy Hollow from Fablelistik Editions  Then I’d go back to the computer, have all kinds of problems, and another job would come in and I'd go back to drawing. As this went on, the drawing became more interesting to me and I started to get better. The computer eventually got pushed into the corner and started to gather dust. At that point, I was committed to drawing. I didn’t think much about digital for a long time after that.   I painted like crazy all through the ‘80s. In the early ‘90s, National Geographic   Magazine called and I was basically painting chunky oil paint at the time, which is not something they usually bought. They always bought the highly detailed stuff. But they loved what I was doing and we had a relationship for a long time working together. Then digital started to crawl into the field. At that point, I was against it and thought it really didn’t look good, no texture, no strokes. But then I watched as it got better. That was when I met Irene Gallo (at the time Art Director of Tor Books).   We would talk about this all the time. She would say, ‘I don't care what technique it is, as long as it works for the book cover. If they hit the deadline, what's the problem?’ That really changed my opinion and I started to listen to that.   So, I kept painting and I was pretty lucky. I could sell the look of the paint and people were buying it. Then I realized they were buying it because it was unique at that point. A lot of newer illustrators went into digital, but the kind of clever, smart techniques were drifting away from traditionally practiced mediums. Yet the oil paint was still there. And I was moving through it in different ways, using it with different approaches. As I got better and secured more jobs, I just laid my foot on the pedal.   Q: Do you ever play around with digital painting or is that something that you never picked back up?   Yeah. I love it, actually, it's very cool. Now I will often send rough work to a client that's done digitally so they get a sense of where I’m going, but then I do the final in oil.   Q: One of your crowning achievements was an original work of yours, Above the Timberline,  in which you wrote and illustrated the story. What originally sparked this idea and how did it evolve into a fully realized story? I’ve heard legends about how many paintings you did in a single year for that publication.  Can you tell us about the process?   Above The Timberline Cover Art I’ve had an interest in writing for many years and have written a lot, but my painting always took the lead. A film crew wanted to record a video of how I paint and I had to quickly put together an image. Adventure and mystery poured out and I found myself designing a character struggling on a snowy mountainside with his polar bear pack. It combined my love of hiking and survival with my interest and love for animals and mountains. I called it Above the Timberline  and a friend encouraged me to show it to a publisher. I hadn’t thought to do that, but I gave it a shot and they were immediately curious. I then had to sit down and hash out why my character was on that mountainside. Five years later, I had something to work with and sold it to Simon & Schuster.   When the project first started, I was really excited, but then I realized that I needed to do 123 paintings in 11 months. They weren’t small either. I was working with paintings that were 15 inches tall by 47 inches wide. I love widescreen and horizontal paintings, so this was perfect. It was really fun and since I didn’t have deadlines within that time period, I could start a painting and sit on it for a little while, study it and try to determine what it needed before finishing.   One day, I might paint all ice and snow. Another day I'd paint just characters and another day airships or polar bears. I was able to piece them together going back and forth. And if I had the energy to go ahead and finish one, then I would do it, but it would still go on the wall, where I could study it and tweak it later on. I never had that luxury before, but for the most part, I had the final say on what the painting was going to be.   I was having a great time on my own and really didn’t have a formal art director. However, I had to stop all other work, other than teaching twice a week and finishing a couple of DVD covers for Eric Skillman at the Criterion Collection . I love those guys, so I slid those in there.   Above The Timberline Interior Art After the first three months, I punched out 49 paintings and I was a little bit toasty. So, I slowed down for a couple of weeks and then I picked my speed back up again and carried on through the summer. And in October (two months before the deadline), I had about 22 left to do and finished in time for them to be photographed as well. I had to clean all those up and get them in on the due date. The day I turned in the last painting to the photographer to scan, I thought, “my throat feels funny,” and boom—I was sick as a dog right after that. Stayed just fine the whole year painting and then I got sick. The adrenaline had kept me going.   Seven years after I painted that initial image, the book came out. I’d started the story with very small thumbnail sketches, drawing while daydreaming. This led to curiosities about the main character, which led to places he’d be, which led to conversations of dialogue, which led to an overall story. I basically started in the middle and worked my way outward. I had an ending in mind, and made small steps to connect the dots to get there. The biggest hurdle was trying to keep the story contained to 250 pages…and gathering enough reference to work from. Sometimes I just had to work from my head, but it eventually all got done.   Q: One iconic project that you worked on was a series of covers for the legendary Western Author Louis L’Amour. How did they find you for that project and what was the process like working with the L’Amour estate?   I originally got contacted by the Louis L'Amour Western Magazine  to discuss working on covers for his novels. They saw some of my work in National Geographic and thought I could handle cowboys based on my previous illustrations. I did a few smaller jobs for the Magazine at first, but didn’t know they were looking for an artist shift on the covers. They wanted to get away from super-detailed realism and into more of an expressive painting style for the new covers.   Lonely on the Mountain Cover Art They had been looking for someone for years and Beau L'Amour had seen my work in the magazine (He actually bought the first painting I did for it). He went to his contacts and said, ‘I think this is the guy.’ The first thing they wanted to do was a series of the Sackett family novels, which has 17 books in it. I thought, ‘I don't think I can read all of them and make the deadline.’ So, Beau and I would sit on the phone for hours, and he would tell me the stories and talk about what he wanted to see. Then I would take notes and start doing thumbnails. It got to the point where the art director would just say, ‘call Beau.’ I would send in a sketch to the art director that was already approved by him. I have now done close to 70 book covers for them and even have an exhibit of 50 of these at the A.R. Mitchell Museum of Western Art, in Trinidad, Colorado.   Q: You’ve done concept art and promotional work for film projects—how is that workflow different from your illustration background? Were there any film-related projects that pushed you outside your comfort zone stylistically or technically?   I’ve worked in several categories for films: movie posters ( Dune ‘84, The River ), original paintings for on set ( Finding Forrester ), paintings for illustrations within the film story ( Buster Scruggs ), concept work ( Narnia ), credits ( Play Dirty ), and DVD covers (a wide range for Criterion Collection). When directors come to me, they usually want something specific, something they’ve already visualized, since Hollywood productions aren’t crazy about experimenting with budgets. So, I end up pushing myself outside my range. Recently, I used a palette knife to smear paint around while recording the process of painting a couple of portraits for the titles of the film, Play Dirty.   Q: Many of our readers are small/fine press book collectors and will recognize your work from the many illustrated books you have done with presses like Lyra’s Books, Arete Editions, Conversation Tree Press, Curious King, The Folio Society and Fablelistik. What do you appreciate about working in this space and what were some of your favorite projects? Why do you think you have been so frequently used in the modern fine press movement going on right now?   I love working in the limited edition press arena because the publishers come and ask me to give the story my personal vision. While I’m still working for the client, I’m given much more freedom to explore. I share that exploration with the client. We talk and work out the necessary imagery I’ve developed for them with an eye for the final edition and how it will feel to the collector. It’s a collaboration, and that’s always admirable. Recently I worked on a favorite edition of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz for Lyra's Books, and I finished paintings for The Legend of Sleepy Hollow in February which should be released soon.   Illustrations for Wizard of Oz from Lyra's Books I think in the business, it really does work out that if you establish a good working relationship with a client, word gets out you’re not going to stab them in the back. You’re going to meet the deadline and be great to work with. It's kind of like being the Tom Hanks of illustration. Everybody loves to work with him because he understands the problems that need solving and he moves with it and does the work.   Back in 2004 or so, Marcelo Anciano (current owner of Arete Editions) contacted me. He had asked around and was trying to find someone to do the painting for the third volume of books he was doing for a series of Conan stories. He emailed me, and said, “You come highly recommended as an oil painter, would you be interested in Conan?” I told him that I didn’t know anything about Conan and I was going to have to read up on it. We got along as fast friends and I would see him whenever I went to London. That relationship was something he remembered when we weren't working together. Many years later, he got into limited edition books and he called me up about The Picture of Dorian Gray . Initially, I said I would be interested, but the thing about The Picture of Dorian Gray  is that everybody always paints the last painting in the story. I had this idea about watching the picture deteriorate over time, and he loved the idea. I did nine of them and the Oscar Wilde people heard about it and got on board and fell in love with the idea as well.   The Picture of Dorian Gray Interior Illustrations from Lyra's Books While I was working with Marcelo, he had his books produced through Rich Tong, who runs Lyra’s Books. The three of us got talking and they asked me what books I would like to do if I could pick anything. I sent him a list of ideas and they were very interested in the Wizard of Oz , so I was immediately on board. As a kid I used to watch that in black and white TV in my living room with my parents every spring and so I knew the movie inside and out, but I didn't really know the books that well. They’d call and we would discuss aspects of each production and everybody seemed really great in the small press business. They're all just people who love publishing and I've always loved books so it’s a great fit. Q: As your career has evolved, do you find yourself trying to focus more on specific areas of illustration, or are you still open to new and interesting projects that are outside of what you are most known for?   It has certainly narrowed down at this point of my career, mainly publishing and some easel work. I would love to simply work on the books I want to work on and sell the originals in galleries, and become the gallery painter I've always pictured myself becoming. However, every now and then, a special job comes up. I just finished doing 11 murals for a museum in Texas on the early developing days of the state and how it all started. I’ve also done some postage stamps and those are awfully fun . Artemis II Mission Patch Recently, I’ve been doing mission patches for NASA astronauts and that's also been a great experience. It's something you'd think would be simple, but they need everything perfect. I’d spend a year or so going back and forth, but sitting down with astronauts at NASA—it’s just too doggone cool. I recently finished the mission patch for the Artemis 2 crew that's going to circle the moon and come back. I had to design two patches, but I’ll let the astronauts reveal why.    I'm hoping to do more gallery work in the future, primarily through Galerie Daniel Maghen  in Paris. They approached me at San Diego Comic Con and initially I didn’t think much of it, but they kept reaching out to me and at some point I spoke to Charles Vess about it and he spoke very highly of them. He said, “If they want you to do a show, do it.” I started talking to Olivier from the gallery and they did a show for me that was just wonderful. I was supposed to do another show with them, and then the pandemic struck and everything went to hell. So that's kind of the next thing I want to do. Q: Throughout your long and illustrious career, what are the things that have changed the most about your industry and what has remained most consistent?   The work has changed, the styles and interests have changed, and the process of getting work and having steady clients has changed. The people haven’t changed much, though. Deadlines are shorter, and productions are smaller, but the people are all trying to do their best to create a solid visual together. The teamwork is still a remarkable and wonderful aspect when it works well, and it’s still the same kind of failure of attitudes when it doesn’t. So, I try to instill in the students that I mentor that learning to work with people will get them very far, even when the practicalities of the workflow shifts and changes. Roll with the changes, take your risks, and be professional about surviving in the arts.   Q: What are you currently working on and is there anything you can share about upcoming projects in 2025 and 2026?   Cover Art for Last Argument of Kings from Curious King I’m about to start working on several more limited edition books, Frankenstein  and A Christmas Carol , plus the third volume of the Foundation  series for Conversation Tree Press and the third volume of The First Law  series, by Joe Abercrombie, with Curious King. I plan to have an art book of many of my paintings come out in 2026, and another based on my posts for the Muddy Colors website. I’m working on releasing a folio of many of my paintings from some of the limited editions, and hoping to release a book of sketches eventually as well. This interview was done in a series of communications back and forth and a Zoom call and we want to thank Greg for his willingness to be a part of this series and also for collaborating with us on a future broadside. If you want to check out some of Greg's many past works, you can take a look at his portfolio on his website https://www.manchess.com/ To stay up to date on the breadth of everything he is working on, you can follow him on Instagram . Interview by: Zach Harney of the Collectible Book Vault

Less is More. Such simple but eloquent design. This is the limited numbered edition of Stephen King's 'Salem's Lot , signed in black ink, - published by Centipede Press. This book feels like a tome when you pick it up in the plain black cloth slipcase. It measures 9 x 13 inches. But when you take it out of the slipcase, the black cloth of the boards feels real nice to the touch and makes the book easy and pleasant to handle. The Mohawk Superfine feels good for such a large novel. Still a heavy paper but not too much. The 2 color printing really stands out next to the gorgeous duotone photographs by Jerry Uelsmann. Signed by Stephen King and Jerry Uelsmann.

I go through fases in my collecting. I hit that point where I'm very picky in what I look for in a limited edition or fine press book. Despite less frenzied buying I still suffer from book creep in my libraries. So it's time for several books to find new owners. I decided to photograph the books I'm going to sell and some really deserve some extra attention. Why not keep them then if they are so beautiful?! Usually because I haven't read and realistically won't read the story and can't justify keeping an expensive limited edition of it on my shelves. Worst case scenario is that i'll have to buy it back in the future. The book that prompted me to say this digital farewell is The Wolfen by Whitley Strieber. When taking pictures i couldn't help but admire how well this edition was done. This is 1 of 26 copies of the Suntup lettered edition of The Wolfen. That bright red works really nice with the brown Goatskin. Holding it reminded me of why goatskin evokes that luxurious feel. It smells good, it feels good and it looks awesome. The more I look at it, the harder it gets to let it go... The Wolfen - Suntup lettered edition

Tom Ayling - Oxford, England It is such a pleasure to get to open up our newest interview series, looking at antiquarian and rare book sellers around the world, with our friend Tom Ayling. He has more recently ventured out on his own after getting started at Jonkers Rare Books and was one of the first booksellers to successfully grow a large and dedicated following on social media. His youth, passion, and wonderful storytelling have allowed him to carve a unique space in the rare book industry and draw interest from all different walks of life. In this interview, we explore the path that led him into bookselling, the challenges of an ever-evolving market, and what continues to inspire his pursuit of the rare and remarkable. Whether you’re a seasoned collector or a curious newcomer, Tom’s insights into the world of antiquarian books offer a window into the enduring magic of books as objects—and as connections to our cultural past. Q: You clearly have a unique passion and love for the art of bookmaking and are a true bibliophile. What in your upbringing pointed you towards this profession and were there any especially important figures or moments that helped pave that path for you? Tom Ayling Certainly. The book that first ignited my passion for collecting was one I received at the age of ten—one of Caroline Lawrence’s  Roman Mysteries  series. Around that time, she visited my school, and I eagerly brought along a stack of her books to be signed. It was the first time I had ever met an author, and the first time an author signed a book for me. What stood out most was her reaction upon seeing one particular volume. Six of my books were paperbacks, and one was a hardback. She noted that the hardback was a first edition—a term I’d never heard before, but one that sounded very attractive nonetheless.  What happened next was remarkable: she told me that because it was a first edition, it contained a small error, which she proceeded to correct by hand right in front of me. Before doing so, she inscribed the book  for me in Latin with the phrase  'ars longa,'  meaning  'Skillfulness takes time.'  Then, she turned to page 166 and made the correction herself. Suddenly, my copy of this book felt so much more special than the one I walked into the school library with moments earlier, and that is what makes book collecting so special: looking for that one copy of a book that feels so much more valuable to you than any other.   Q: Before creating your own business, you worked for Jonkers Rare Books in Henley-on-Thames. What were some of the advantages to working with a larger team and what were the primary motivations for eventually doing this on your own? What have you enjoyed the most about running your own business?   Jonkers Rare Books I was very fortunate to have my introduction to the trade in rare books at Jonkers. It was my first job after university, and over the course of my seven years there, I learnt so much about rare books, book collecting and bookselling. Probably the most important thing I learnt there was that you always have to focus on the copy of the book in front of you; what makes this copy special or makes it stand out, and why should somebody buy this one instead of any other.   Early in 2024, I felt it was time for a new challenge and decided to set up my own business dealing in rare books and manuscripts. I worked from home initially, and now trade from a private office in the Oxfordshire countryside. It’s very different, and much more daunting, being a business owner compared to an employee, but it has been thrilling to see the business grow over the last year or so.   Q: During your time at Jonkers Rare Books, you started posting videos on their Instagram and grew the following to hundreds of thousands of followers. Even starting from scratch with your own Instagram account, you already have over 200k followers. Has the interest in your content surprised you in any way, or did you know there would be an appetite for the kind of videos you set out to make? How important has this following been to your success as an antiquarian bookseller?     I’ve long thought that the potential market for collecting rare books is much bigger than it currently is, and far larger than we necessarily imagine. As a collectible, compared to other categories, I think books are comparatively inexpensive, and incredibly rewarding objects to build collections of.   Social media has, I think, proved that to be correct. Lots of fellow dealers, including Reid Moon, Rebecca Romney, Sienna Wells and Adam Weinberger are consistently reaching new audiences with their content. And when you add up the numbers of people watching videos by my colleagues or my own videos, there are tens of millions of people engaging with the rare book trade every single month, and lots of these people are turning up at bookshops and book fairs eager to learn more and start collecting books.   Reaching these new audiences is a really big part of our mission as a business, as we try to share our love of book collecting with as many people as possible, and also present the hobby as more accessible and inclusive than people might think.   Q: Now that you have been a bookseller for quite some time, I’m curious if you have seen changes through the years in customers book buying habits? Have you seen any clear shifts in what people are looking for throughout your career and how do you see the role of booksellers evolving in the next decade?   There will always be gentle ebbs and flows in the market as certain authors or genres or collecting areas rise and fall in popularity, but although we try to be quite innovative in the way we communicate, we are reasonably traditional booksellers at heart. We try to find either very nice or very interesting copies of great books, and share them with as many people as possible.  I’m often quite sceptical when people describe a certain author or collecting category as “out of fashion”. I think in most cases it is just a communication problem, and books that once sold themselves as “essential,”  “collectible” or “important” sometimes need to have their own merits restated from first principles.    As for the future, I’m long books and I’m long book collecting, so I’m very optimistic about the continued growth of the trade over the next decade. The onus is on us as booksellers to keep finding interesting material, and finding new ways of bringing it to people.   I’m on the National Executive Committee of the PBFA, which runs book fairs across the UK, and there was an old tagline attached to PBFA fairs that went, “Bringing The Books To The People." That really is what bookselling has always been about, and it is what I hope we can keep doing going forward.   Q: Being Oxford-based and a lover of Tolkien’s works, it’s no surprise that a large portion of what you sell ends up being related to Tolkien’s Legendarium, including an impressive Tolkien catalogue released recently. Why do you think that Tolkien’s works have seen such meteoric growth and have stood the test of time so well?   Tolkien might be the perfect author for book collecting. And it’s because he understood that books and stories have their own history.    Ist Edition, 2nd Printing of The Hobbit This means that when you are collecting a book like The Hobbit , you aren’t simply buying identical printing after identical printing, you are seeing how the story developed, how illustrations were added and taken away, and particularly how Tolkien changed it over time to incorporate it into the ever-changing world of Middle-earth.    Book history itself is deeply rooted both in Middle-earth and its publication history; we have the Red Book Of Westmarch and the Book Of Mazarbul which exist in-world as documentary records of Middle-earth; but we also have the exercise books where Edith Tolkien transcribed Tolkien’s stories like The Cottage Of The Lost Play , which were then edited and published by their son Christopher over half a century later.    This, along with the sheer scope of Tolkien’s literary and academic output, has created incredibly fertile ground for collectors to till. But of course there is more too; the films of The Lord Of The Rings  and The Hobbit have made Tolkien’s work culturally ubiquitous; and online platforms like the Tolkien Collector’s Guide provide fellowship, knowledge and community for collectors.   Q: What is your process of determining what to seek out and curate for your own offerings? Obviously, it is of peak importance that what you buy is likely to be able to be sold, but are there any other considerations, and do you ever keep books for your own collection?   We take a very personal approach to working with book collectors, and so the vast majority of material we handle is never publicly offered for sale, or even shared in online content. It is discreetly offered and sold to collectors we have an established relationship with. Sometimes this is the direct fulfilment of requests and collectors’ wants. Other times it is more holistic, and recommending that a certain book or manuscript would fit well alongside other items in somebody’s collection.   St Andrews For my own part, I have collected books, manuscripts and artwork related to the town and university of St Andrews for well over a decade now. It was the town where I really got deep into book collecting and hunting. St Andrews has been one of the great pleasures of the last ten years or so. But I have recently taken the decision to finally produce a catalogue of my collection, and offer it for sale, so that will be coming out soon.   Q: You were recently interviewed on BBC Breakfast on rare books and book collecting. How did this interview develop and did you ever imagine yourself participating in something like this when you first set out to sell books?   The rare book trade is in the news every now and then, although in recent years, it is sales of first editions of  Harry Potter And The Philosopher’s Stone  at ever-increasing prices that seem to capture journalists’ attention. On the back of a sale at auction of a fairly mediocre example of that book (for a fairly mediocre sum), the BBC asked me to come on to talk about the rare book market and why people collect first editions. Advocating for book collecting and the trade is one of my favourite things to do, so I hope I converted a few viewers to collecting in the process!   Tom Ayling BBC Breakfast Interview Q: Many of the people who follow us are strictly modern fine press collectors or maybe only dabble in antiquarian books. What would be some of your best pieces of advice for someone who wants to start collecting antiquarian books but doesn’t know where to start?   Talk to me, or another bookseller, about the sort of things you are interested in, and how that might translate into actually acquiring material. Nobody starts collecting with a fully formed idea of what they would like to collect, but this can emerge as you talk with dealers and collectors, and as you gradually expose yourself to more material. If you have a local antiquarian bookseller, then visit their shop, or find out where your nearest rare book fair is and try to visit. The more material you talk about and see in person, the more you will begin to appreciate exactly what it is that excites you.   Q: Can you talk about a couple of the biggest misconceptions and misunderstandings about antiquarian books (such as the handling of them, their value, preserving them, etc.)? Tom lecturing at West Dean College Books are generally incredibly hardy, and pretty straightforward to look after. The wearing of gloves is discouraged, and their use in popular culture has propagated an unfortunate myth that they help preserve books, when it truth they increase the likelihood of damage.    Caring for books comes down to three elements: storage, handling, and environment.   In terms of storage, books are best kept upright on a bookshelf, next to other books of a similar size. Try not to pack the shelf too tightly, nor too loosely. Once a year, take a clean soft brush to remove dust from the top edges of the books.    Rare books are safe to handle, look through and read, and I would encourage people to do this as much as possible. When you do so, use both hands to support the book, try not to open it too widely, and use clean, dry hands.  Books are best preserved in a stable environment, away from light and heat sources such as windows and radiators. If you measure such things the ideal room temperature is 16°C to 19°C (60-66°F); and relative humidity should be kept as constant as possible, within 45% to 60%.  Q: You recently have moved into a new office and added Sienna Wells to your team, which must be really exciting. How do you see your business continuing to grow, and where would you see yourself in ten years if you could build your business exactly how you envisioned it?   Tom Ayling and Sienna Wells The business has grown quite quickly over the last year or so, which has been incredibly exciting and rewarding, but in the short term we are just looking to continue to provide a really high level of service to people that want to work with us either on the buy side or the sell side of the business.   Sienna joined the team late last year, and her academic background in medieval manuscripts has been invaluable, and it has helped us broaden our offerings, so the material we handle now stretches back before the printing press. It is nice to be able to offer material from each century from the 12th to the 21st!   Q: Do you have anything else exciting coming up that you want to share about? There is always new and exciting material passing through our hands, so it is worth joining our mailing list to be kept in the loop with those. Sienna is currently working on our first catalogue of medieval and Renaissance manuscripts, which will be out this summer.    We also recently moved into a new office, and are beginning to accept visits from interested collectors by appointment. Anyone interested in browsing can reach out through our website. This interview was done in a series of communications back and forth with Tom and we want to thank him for his willingness to be a part of this series with his busy travel schedule and starting his own business. If you want to see more from Tom you can check him out at https://www.tomwayling.co.uk/ . You can also follow him on Instagram   or TikTok  for consistent interesting content about rare and collectible books! Interview by: Zach Harney a contributor to the Collectible Book Vault *Since there are often different spellings in American English and British English of the same words, we have chosen to adhere to the spelling of the person who is speaking rather than conform to one convention for the whole interview.

We have the pleasure of discussing a truly remarkable project that has been in the works for a couple of years now: a fine press edition of Brave New World—Aldous Huxley’s iconic dystopian novel. This edition not only preserves Huxley’s haunting vision of the future but elevates it through the team's exceptional craftsmanship, from thoughtful typography and binding design, to reimagined art from British pop artist Allen Jones. We’ll be diving into the process behind creating what will undoubtedly be the definitive fine press version of Brave New World for years to come, exploring what it takes to breathe new life into a classic dystopian masterpiece. We want to give a huge thanks to Marcelo and the team for giving us a peek behind the curtain and are excited for the public preorder coming on May 31st at 5pm UK time.   Marcelo Anciano – (Owner, interior layout, overall design)   Q: You have talked about this project being in development for a few years now, and you must be excited that the preorder for the book is now imminent. It’s certainly been at the top of my list since I found out you were working on it. Can you tell us about the initial decision to recreate this classic and how it evolved between Rich Tong (binder), Phil Abel (owner, letterpress printer), and yourself (owner, interior layout and overall design)?   When Phil and I talked about creating Arete we always wanted to bring out the books which were being a little bit neglected by the Fine Press publishing community, as well as the ‘blockbusters’ which we knew would be well represented. A classic like Brave New World hadn’t actually been represented in our world for fifty years, since the letterpressed Limited Edition Club version, and my memory is that there wasn’t any colour in that book. Brave New World was one of the first books that we went after the rights for soon after Phil and I committed to Areté Editions.    Lettered Edition of Brave New World from Areté Editions Brave New World is one of the most important books in the Western World. The Science Fiction that Huxley pioneered was a much more insidious future than Orwell’s 1984 imagined. It came from a society that kept its populous in check by the sort of media we have now! This is a quote from a Huxley bio; ‘…the social and economic divide between the haves and the have nots is legally enforced and discontent is quelled by advertising, medication, sex and entertainment.’ Sounds familiar?! The story has characters that come from this society and start to question the world they live in. Their world is separated from a world of indigenous peoples who live in a world untouched by modern concerns and they bring back a man who was born amongst them but is from the Brave New World . The repercussions in the characters reveal the insidious nature of the future.   Phil was amazed that someone like Allen Jones wanted to do a book like this and his vision of the book was that it would be a unique Fine Press book with Allen’s participation.   Q: In the post-WWI era, when the entire world got an eye-opening look at large-scale totalitarianism in the modern world, we saw the birth of the dystopian genre with works like We by Yevgeny Zamyatin and Brave New World  from Huxley. What had your prior experience with this title been before working on it, and why is now the time for this book to receive this particular treatment?   Numbered Edition of Brave New World I read Brave New World as a student and the subtle vision of the future seemed not as bombastic as 1984 . It was always 1984 that seemed more relevant then, but actually it is Brave New World that resonates today. It is so prophetic. The way that the characters are affected by the world and their questioning of the way they are all kept in check is so modern and so real somehow. The fact that Brave New World has not been done in recent years as a Fine Press book is astonishing really. It’s a landmark book that has influenced science fiction ever since its initial publication. Its impact cannot be underestimated.   Q: There were a lot of different ways you could have approached this artistically, but you decided to pull in legendary British pop artist Allen Jones (one of the last living pop artists) to create the imagery that would guide the overall aesthetic of this project. Can you share with us your thought process behind this choice and how it has been working with someone outside of the typical artists in the fine press world?   There are many ways the story could have been illustrated. The Folio Society had done a lovely version where they illustrated the book with images of the world and its cities. It was quite grand and dystopian. I wanted it to have the vibrancy of the pop world that the characters seemed to be living in. Although it was published in the ‘30’s it was the pop era of the late ‘50’s early ‘60’s that it felt like to me. Colourful! Bright! Perfect world! Why would you want to have any change! Be happy with what you’ve got. And if you are not, take drugs, have sex, go to parties. The sixties. And now.   Both Rich and I came through the Fine Art college degrees. The artists we both were aware of during our student days were the new YBAs (Young British Artists) as well as the Pop Artists and the reaction to the American Abstract Expressionists by people like Warhol and, in England, Kitaj and Bacon. Also, an artist who was the epitome of the UK’s pop movement: Allen Jones.   British Pop Artist Allen Jones Allen is a painter and printmaker and sculptor. His prints go for many thousands, so he was always going to be a long shot for our project.   As I said, I wanted the book to feel like a pop art reflection of consumer society. Rich was a huge fan of Allen Jones’ work, so when I found a way to reach out to him, Rich was thrilled. Allen knew the book and could see how his art could complement and enhance the story. Allen wanted to avoid the landscapes of the world and concentrate on the characters and the ‘advertising, medication, sex and entertainment’ that keeps them in check. Perfect. And, if he wasn’t a ‘traditional’ illustrator - he drew and painted and did prints like one. Allen is a masterful colourist. Seeing Rich working with him was amazing, and to be part of seeing it come to fruition. I feel that they have created a work of pop art.   Interior Cut-Out Illustrations by Allen Jones Allen gave us much more than we expected. We asked for a few colour pieces. He has ended up doing 29 colour images and dozens of black and white pictures, some full pagers and some spot illustrations.   He also came to us saying he had come up with an idea: In the book, the characters leave the comfort of the Brave New World to visit the indigenous people that ends up having a massive effect on them all. Allen came up with a colour section with cut-outs  that took the reader from one world to another. It was ambitious and extraordinary! All very visual. An illustration of the journey both physically and mentally as a visual reading experience. Then, it was a question of how. How to actually make it and how to bind that visual journey into the book. This required a great deal of thinking outside of the box.   Q: Those who follow Areté Editions will know that you do multiple states of every book and this release will be no different, but with your background in the arts and your vision for what this book could be, you are doing something pretty unique with this release. Could you tell us a little bit about each tier of this release?   We are doing three editions. The first two will be traditional releases, Lettered and numbered. The bindings that Rich and Allen have created are stunning objects of Fine Press art. They are more like the normal size of books we make, like Coraline or Oz. They have colour images printed on the page and two colour letterpress (red and black) throughout. Decorations, like we did with the bees in Death and Honey, are printed in red highlighting the drug use. They have a colour section with cut outs that I mentioned above and a couple of the artworks are bound in as half pagers. It is one of the most visual books I have done. Interior Illustration from Allen Jones  Later we are doing an oversized, very large sized edition. This will be a totally different version of the book as it is done with metal text (which means a different reading experience) on handmade paper with Allen’s prints actually bound in. Prints which as a folio would be in a gallery. The cover has a sculpture bound into the cover, hand painted by Allen. This will be limited to thirty copies and, as you can imagine, it will be expensive to make but it will be a book that I feel will historically be considered as Art. The kind of book making not seen in many years. We are talking to The Royal Academy to exhibit the book and prints.   Q: This version is clearly going to blur the line and the distinctions between a fine press book with art and traditional art book. Where do you see this release falling on that continuum and how would you describe it?   Fine press books have always pushed the envelope with book making, indeed some of the ‘Art’ books by Picasso and others from a hundred years ago were actually more ‘traditional’ than some Fine Press books today. The books were made by craftspeople and handmade - like the books we, Arete, Lyra, Conversation Tree etc., make today. The artists, like Picasso, Balthus and Jacob Lawrence still mainly, illustrated them. Indeed, some of the Limited Edition Club books were much more adventurous than what we are doing. Think of Heart of Darkness with images by Sean Scully. Abstract artists like Motherwell, De Kooning, Sol Lewitt or Matisse that Limited Edition Club worked with. Fine Press books have always been at the forefront of ‘Art Books’!   I see Brave New World as part of the tradition of Fine Press books but not like some of those above because Allen’s images are much more explicit illustrations of the story than some of the abstract artists above. He draws and paints people as a kind of emotional image making that corresponds to the story. There really is no abstraction from Allen! Interior Illustration and layout in Lettered Edition of Brave New World Q: Assuming you feel like the partnership with Allen Jones was a success and fulfilled a vision of yours from the start, are there any other modern living artists that you would like to collaborate with in the same sort of capacity?   I would love it if our world looked at artists outside of the traditional illustrators that we have all worked with for decades. We will always work with them of course, but we are constantly looking for new and different artists and art styles that can enhance the reading experience. I’d love to see some new voices illustrate books but they have to add meaning. I think Tracy Emin is doing some powerful prints at the moment, Chantal Joffe does extraordinary paintings, like Alice Neel’s work in Fall of the House of Usher . It’s all about finding the right book for the right artist. And a book that people will want to buy!   Phil Abel – Owner and Letterpress Printer   Q: As always, you will be the man at the helm when it comes to the letterpress printing of this upcoming release of Brave New World. Can you share with us how you and Marcelo work together on the interior layout and printing of an Areté  release and what method you are using for the printing of this proje ct?   The upcoming editions of Brave New World will be printed from photopolymer plates. When the design has been finalised, Marcelo sends us his InDesign file, which we impose; that is, position the pages so that when folded after printing, all the pages appear in the right order. We usually print eight pages on each side of a sheet, which will be the case with this book. Getting the imposition wrong would mean costly and time-consuming reprints, so there’s a lot of checking to do before plates are made.   Title Page of Brave New World The first step is to fold pieces of paper in the same way that the book will be folded, and then number the pages. For example, if the binder will fold each sheet as one sixteen-page section, we fold three times to make those sixteen pages. Once we’ve checked that all the page numbers are present and none have been duplicated, we can impose, which we do in an another InDesign file.  The artwork for each page is placed in the position determined by the dummy. Each set of eight pages is numbered so that we can keep tabs on our work as we go along.    After imposition, we print an inkjet proof of the entire book on A3 paper. Each sheet is printed on both sides, as it will be when we get the book on press. We do this on an inkjet printer that only prints one side at a time, so we have to be careful to re-insert the paper the right way round when doing the second side. These proofs are then folded and trimmed and again checked that everything is in the right place.   Before we can make plates, we make negatives of each set of eight pages. They’re printed on film on a large-format, high-resolution Epson inkjet. The negatives are placed in the plate-making machine face down on a sheet of plate material and held tight to it with a vacuum system. Ultra-violet light is shone through the negative, which hardens the parts of the plate on which it falls. The plate is then moved to a water bath, where rotating brushes remove those parts of the plate that haven’t been hardened, leaving the relief printing surface. After drying, there is more exposure to ultraviolet light to harden the surface further and a thin, double-sided adhesive film is attached to the back. When we come to print the plate, the protective film attached to the adhesive is removed and the plate stuck to a mount, which is locked into the press for printing.   Interior Black and White Illustration and Chapter Heading Some of our books have been printed from hot-metal setting, which is an even more elaborate and expensive process. When type-setting machines were invented, an operator typed the words on a special keyboard that punched holes in a paper tape. The tape controlled a separate casting unit, telling it which letter or space to cast next. That process is usually replaced by a computer these days, and decisions about hyphenation etc. are automated instead of being made by a time-served compositor. This can lead to some unacceptable word breaks, and there can be several rounds of checking of the software-generated proofs to get the setting right. Marcelo then uses these proofs to decide where the type will break on each page. Before the type comes to Hand & Eye, we get long columns of proofs of the cast type, which have to be checked for casting errors. Once they have been corrected and the type sent to us, we start the long process of making up pages. The columns of type are divided up according to the layout, and each pair of facing pages are proofed again. These proofs are checked, too.   We make a folded dummy of the book as part of this process, too. When we come to print the book, it’s again used to position the pages. This time we move around pieces of metal and lock them into the press with expanding wedges called quoins.   Now all we have to do is get the ink onto the paper…   Rich Tong - Bookbinder   Q: We recently got to see a prototype of Brave New World  while visiting you at the bindery and you are trying something unique with this particular release. You will be using one of Allen’s original pieces combined with a full leather binding on the boards, which I know has not been straightforward. How did this idea come about and what has been particularly challenging about this design?   The initial idea for it actually came about quite quickly, which makes a nice change! From the very beginning, I knew that this was to be Allen’s book and that the covers should absolutely represent him as an artist. The best way to do this was to use one of his pieces on the cover, if possible. Numbered Edition Binding I was in a meeting with Allen, Marcelo and Leslie Gerry at Allen’s London home when the idea for the numbered edition binding first struck. It was an informal get together where all the ideas, bits of paper, laptops and everything were spread out on one big table and everyone was having a good chinwag about the project in general. I was flicking through the layout that Marcelo had recently put together and viewing much of the artwork for the first time when I came across the painting that we ended up using. The colours of the dancing figures were so bold against the pale backdrop and I immediately pictured it as a full cover binding and I knew that I wanted to try it and see if it would work. It was so striking and graphic. Allen gave his blessing right away and thought it was a great idea, so I came back to the bindery with a bit of a plan. Unfortunately, after many attempts, we were unable to recreate the detail of shaded areas with foil blocking alone. Creating foil blocking dies requires black artwork only and the brass is etched very deep, so creating shade is almost impossible. The only way to really do it is with dots, but that comes with its own problems and would still never give us the finer detail we needed. After a period of dead-ends, we decided to pursue the idea of having the leather printed, which gave us surprisingly good, if rather expensive, results. So good, in fact, that I thought a very light red thumbprint and slight red smudge on the leather was due to me being careless with the newly printed leather. It turned out, after closer inspection, that it was actually a really accurate and detailed reproduction of the original artwork! The quality and detail of the printing are remarkable, especially considering that it is being printed on a soft, grained surface. There are loads and loads of tiny little splatters of paint all over the leather that you can see when you look closely at it.   Q: You have mentioned that you spent some time with the art of Allen Jones in university and went to exhibitions of his work as part of a course you were in. It must be really surreal to get to work with him so intimately. How has the experience been overall and what has been the most surprising thing about working with him?   The experience of working with Allen has been surreal – yes – but also a dream come true for me. As you say, during my time studying Fine Art at university, his name came up frequently. By that time (the late 1990’s/early 2000’s) he had firmly established himself as a Pop Art icon and was a senior academician at the Royal Academy of Arts. Lettered Edition Binding I was aware of his connection to the furniture designs in the A Clockwork Orange  film (or rather, his non-involvement as it ended up) and, related to that, his controversial sculptures for which he is perhaps best known. I remember attending art history lectures where we were asked to study and analyze his work. I developed a great interest in his art and over the years, I have visited multiple exhibitions and displays of his work around the world. He told me that he even had an open-air exhibition at Ludlow Castle, of all places. Unfortunately, that was shortly before I moved here so I didn’t make it to that one! I have always been a big fan of his work and I have always admired his paintings in particular. They are so vibrant and his use of colour is astounding. Working with him on Brave New World has meant that we talk on the phone and message each other quite regularly, and he also invited me down to his studio which was such a wonderful experience. You should see his studio. Wow! It blew my mind. The sheer size of it is remarkable and it’s absolutely stuffed to the rafters with paintings and sculptures of all sizes. A proper treasure trove of art. He has very much made this project feel like a true collaboration between us and that is extremely flattering. It is something that will stay with me forever. As a student of art, ‘collaborating’ with a famous (some might say infamous) artist that you have long admired has to be at the top of the list of things to do in your life. I am extremely honoured to have spent time working with him. He is a genuinely lovely, and generous man and I’ve enjoyed every moment.   Interior Illustration from Allen Jones Marcelo Anciano – (Owner, interior layout, overall design) Q: Up to this point, you haven't had a formal rights system, but it sounds like you will be implementing that soon. How will your right system be structured and what led you to implement it at this point in time? We are thinking of going a patron/rights route in order to eliminate the unknown of sales, especially in this current market. The world has changed and we have had quite a few collectors ask us to do so. I’m from the old school train of thought where one could just buy the books that they wanted and if a Fine Press brought out a title I wanted, I’d buy it. As a publisher, that doesn’t make sense now. One of our books in particular has been a slow, but very steady, seller. That means that our ability to create other books is put on hold and freezes our schedules. We need patrons to keep the press going. Each book needs to have about 85-90% sales to break even. If we sell less than that we have to wait until we have cash to keep going with the other books, bearing in mind that it takes at least two years to actually make the books! Because our customers are, in effect, supporting our press, not just buying a book, we wanted to thank them and acknowledge their support. The books we do with Lyra and Rich’s rights system prove to us that keeping a Fine Press running can work, especially as we are really the same team! So, we’re thinking that everyone who has previously purchased our books will be offered the right to purchase Brave New World. It also means that anyone who takes up the offer won't have to speed purchase on the day they are put up for sale. If you have bought a numbered you will be offered a presale of BNW numbered and any future sales, if it has been a lettered/Roman you will be offered a Roman position. If you bought from Arete you will be contacted. This will set our limitation and we’ll sell a few more to the public depending on the patron’s desire for that particular title. Foldout Interior Illustration from Allen Jones   Q: Is there anything else you have coming in 2025 and beyond that you’d like to share or tease at all?   I’m working on some projects with Rich, coming is The Alchemist and we’re doing Carmilla , which is looking really tasty, and … an unannounced project. The book is blowing my mind with its colour. The artist is Leslie Gerry who worked with Allen Jones on the prints for Brave New World . I’m also doing Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy for Anthony at Curious King. With Areté we are coming with Lud-in-the-Mist after Brave New World , another landmark forgotten fantasy novel that has influenced novelists for decades. It will also be amazingly rich with images. This interview was done in a series of communications back and forth and we want to thank Marcelo for his time and encouragement. If you want to see more from Areté you can check them out at https://www.arete-editions.com/   and sign up for their mailing list to get periodic updates. You can also follow Areté on Facebook  and Twitter . Interview by: Zach Harney co-founder of the Collectible Book Vault *Since there are often different spellings in American English and British English of the same words, we have chosen to adhere to the spelling of the person who is speaking rather than conform to one convention for the whole interview.

Interview with The Folio Society, Susanna Clarke, and Julian De Narvaez Last year, we interviewed The Folio Society for their highly anticipated release of Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell. This year, they are releasing an incredible edition of another brilliant novel from Susanna Clarke, Piranesi. This was one of my favorite novels from the last few years and I am extremely excited to take a look at what The Folio Society is putting together for this incredibly unique and captivating story. We were fortunate enough to also get contributions from Susanna Clarke and Julian De Narvaez on this project as well, getting a sneak peek at every aspect of this wonderful production. Expected Release Date: May 6th The Folio Society Team   Q: It is so exciting that after the release of Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norell,  you are following it up with another brilliant Susanne Clarke book, Piranesi . Coming after a long hiatus from getting new work from Clarke, it came out of nowhere and really blew people away. Was this project already in progress before the release of Jonathan Strange , or did it come as a new idea based on the success of that book? Can you walk us through the process of discovering this title and deciding to publish it through the Folio Society?     With the success of the Folio edition of  Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell , it's clear that Susanna Clarke has a devoted fanbase, and there continues to be a strong appetite among our customer base for genre fiction. With that in mind, it made sense to publish a Folio edition of  Piranesi , a novel that is arguably as popular as  Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell . Piranesi  is set in a different universe from Clarke's other books, but it is in many ways a more accessible choice for the fact that it is a slim volume and a stand-alone story. It was a bestseller in the US and the UK, and it won the prestigious Women's Prize for Fiction. As well as winning this major literary award,  Piranesi  was shortlisted for the Nebula and the Hugo awards, which is a testament to the book's crossover appeal. Q: While Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell was challenging due to the size and complexity, Piranesi is very concise in comparison. Are there any unique challenges you faced during the production or design phase of this book, and how does your approach differ when you have a lot less to work with in terms of the text?   The editor was always keen on a small format for this one and for it to feel quite different to Jonathan Strange as it is a very different story. We used unique typesetting to show that the story is told via extracts of journal entries as well.   Q: While this is not one of your higher-end limited editions, there are some unique and wonderful touches to this piece, like the cutout on the slipcase. How do you determine when certain books will get the limited treatment and what features will be part of a particular production like this one?   All Folio books are special! We will also have 100 copies that will be signed by Susanna Clarke. The cover artwork and the way the faun is positioned on the front board gave the opportunity for a large shape to be cut out of the slipcase and for the artwork to show through. A head shape seemed appropriate for the mental turmoil Piranesi experiences. The gold blocked birds link the slipcase to the book cover.   Illustrator – Julian De Narvaez   Q: What was your relationship with  Piranesi  before being offered to do the illustrations by Folio Society? Were you familiar with the story, and if not, what did you do to prepare for illustrating this edition of it? When I accepted the project, I immersed myself in the novel, taking detailed notes on its atmosphere, themes, and the protagonist’s unique perception of the world. To prepare for the illustrations, I researched architectural elements reminiscent of the novel’s vast, mysterious space and studied classical engravings, including those of Giovanni Battista Piranesi, and also explored ways to visually capture the novel’s sense of solitude, wonder, and timelessness. My goal was to translate the book’s intricate and dreamlike world into evocative images that enhance the reading experience.   Q: I first became aware of your work through your contribution to the release of  Slaughterhouse Five  with Suntup Editions, which was beautifully done. From observing your art more generally now, you have this ability to blend styles that create illustrations that can somehow be whimsical and ominous at the same time, which is why when I heard you were named as illustrator, I thought it was such a great fit. What were some of the primary emotions you were trying to capture in these illustrations and what techniques do you use to achieve that?   There is a sense of silence in the spaces Piranesi wanders through, where you can almost hear echoes fading into the distance. This was something I wanted to capture in the illustrations, which is why I focused on making the space and atmosphere the true protagonists of the image, rather than the characters themselves, who appear barely distinguishable amidst the interplay of light and the sculptures that populate these vast settings. These sculptures, spanning different artistic periods, reinforce the feeling of mystery and timelessness. That contrast—one that raises more questions than it answers—was essential in shaping the book’s psychological atmosphere.   Q: In this story, the setting or “the House” is arguably a main character that is much more important to the story than simply a backdrop for the narrative to take place in. When you started envisioning how you would depict the setting, what were some of the most important aspects of capturing the unknown and mystery of the House through your illustrations? With the setting having a sense of repetitiveness throughout the story, how did you set to distinguish differences throughout the different parts of the House?   Absolutely, the House feels like a living entity, shaping the story just as much as any character.    As I was defining the graphic tone of the book and distributing the number of illustrations, I realized that the text is written in such a visual way that my role was to channel that sense of journey into images. I found that the sculptures would serve as a key bridge to depict these scenes. I didn’t want to explain the space or define it completely—I wanted to suggest its vastness, inhabited by stone structures and disconnected sculptures, without taking away the reader’s opportunity to create it for themselves.   My approach was to hint at objects through shadow, allowing the reader to complete Piranesi’s world in their own mind. Achieving this effect and tone was one of the biggest challenges of the project. I had to change my usual methodology, as I typically begin by sketching characters and architecture with pencil outlines. But for this project, I chose to sketch directly with silhouettes, focusing on how light would define the objects. This shift was a graphic challenge that made the project even more exciting for me and expanded the way I think about my visual work.   On the tone and atmosphere of the illustrations, I wanted to emphasize vastness, grandeur, and mystery of the House, while also making it feel intimate and deeply personal, as it is to Piranesi. To capture the unknown and the House’s enigmatic nature, I focused on light, scale, anid atmosphere. I used vast, open spaces to create a sense of infinity, with towering statues and endless corridors that suggest something ancient and beyond human comprehension. At the same time, I contrasted this with moments of quiet intimacy – for example, the illustration in which Piranesi’s figure can be seen in the distance, fishing atop a stone bridge.   The challenge of depicting the repetitiveness of the House while maintaining visual variety pushed me to focus on subtle changes. I played with perspective shifts, different levels of the labyrinth, and atmospheric elements like mist, water, and shifting light to create a sense of movement and transformation. Even though the House is unchanging in many ways, Piranesi’s perception of it evolves, and I wanted the illustrations to reflect that journey.   Q: I’m sure that each one of the illustrations from this project are special to you as the illustrator, but is there one that you will look back on as particularly representative of your work and that you would include in a portfolio of your broader work?   It is difficult to choose a particular illustration, as each one plays an essential role within the visual narrative and reflects a specific emotional state that only fully makes sense when viewed as a whole. This project immersed me in a deep psychological atmosphere for several months, during which I almost felt like Piranesi himself, drawing and exploring spaces that oscillate between the real and the imaginary, between light and shadow. The text is so beautifully written and creates such a vivid atmosphere that, as an artist, it was a pleasure to select and illustrate such surreal and subtle scenes. Now that I think about it, the final illustration of the book, where the characters fade into the mist within an illuminated space, represents the perfect conclusion to the project from a graphic perspective. But on a personal level, it also allowed me to symbolically close a cycle that, in turn, opened new artistic possibilities and paths. The symbolic presence of light in this scene becomes even more meaningful after having traversed illustrations marked by shadows and mystery. However, for this image to have the strength it does, all the previous illustrations are necessary, as they build the journey toward that final moment and give it its symbolic power.   In reality, I enjoyed creating all of the illustrations. For example, the scene where Piranesi observes the chess game played by two monumental stone kings lost in time was a particularly beautiful one to illustrate. It reinforced the atmospheric quality, the interplay of light and shadow, and the vast sense of space—almost as if the viewer must search for the character, lost within the monumental setting, sitting on a stone illuminated by a single ray of light. This is a project where I can truly say that I loved working on each and every illustration.   Author - Susanna Clarke   Q: Piranesi  has such a distinct and atmospheric world. What were the key inspirations behind the labyrinthine House and its peculiar nature? Were you influenced by real-world places or works of art when creating it?   Piranesi  has a lot of literary ancestors. The most obvious inspiration is the short fiction of Jorge Luis Borges, who created unique worlds in jewel-like fiction. In one story, the entire world is a library; another story explores the labyrinth of the Minotaur. Another inspiration would be two of the worlds which are visited by the children in C.S. Lewis's The Magician's Nephew . One is a wood and any visitor to the wood instantly forgets who they are, but also is immediately overcome by a sense of peace and contentment. The second is a vast, empty and decaying palace in the city of Charn. Lewis intended Charn to be threatening and depressing, but I always liked it. These sorts of worlds are quite surreal but they also have a strange kind of clarity to them which I find soothing.   I'm afraid there aren't many real-life models for Piranesi's House, though Chatsworth House in Derbyshire has a sculpture gallery which is a bit reminiscent of one of the Halls. There's only one statue in Piranesi's House which exists in the real world. It's the Gorilla, but I don't know where it is, other than that it’s in a garden somewhere.   Q: In Piranesi  you explore themes of isolation, memory, and the impact of solitude on the human mind. What drew you to these themes, and how do you see Piranesi's relationship with the House evolving over time? How did you conceptualize memory as a narrative device, especially in relation to the protagonist's fragmented sense of identity?   I'm not so much drawn to themes, as much as I am to a picture in my head. In this case, my imagination was haunted by the idea of a vast, empty house, so vast that it contained oceans, and of two characters who met there and what they made of it. The themes emerge organically out of the story. After a long illness, I knew a bit about isolation, both its gifts and its terrors.   Memory has this strange property of being self-healing. By which I mean that any cracks in it tend to get smoothed over and become invisible. It's also the story we tell ourselves of who we are – and our memories could be (largely) right or they could be off by some distance. But even if the story we've told ourselves doesn't match what actually happened, it's still quite informative – it tells us who we want to be, or maybe what we're afraid of confronting in ourselves.   The theme I was most interested in was Piranesi's identification with the House, with something larger than himself. In this way, his solitariness was often subsumed in an overwhelming sense of connection to the world he found himself in. This was a difficult thing to convey.   Q: Many readers interpret the House (the primary setting of the story) in different ways--some see it as a metaphor for the mind, others as a representation of knowledge or memory. Is there a particular view on the House that you had going into it, or would you prefer to leave it open to interpretation? What emotions or ideas did you want readers to walk away with after finishing the book?   I think most writers are happy for readers to interpret their story – and that's particularly true of a book like Piranesi,  which contains so much symbolism in the form of the statues which I deliberately left open to interpretation. They’re like dream imagery or the tarot.   It's very interesting to be asked what emotions I wanted there to be at the end of the book. I don't think anyone's ever asked me that before. I don't want to be too specific. The nearest I can get to it is a sense of wonder, a sense that the world is both beautiful and intensely alive. Not just a backdrop. I don't know whether I achieved it or not.   Q: What does it mean to you that people not only want to read your stories, but love them so much that they want to experience them, packed in such a beautiful way through the limited editions Folio Society has done?   I'm slightly astonished at readers' passion for truly beautiful books. Astonished and delighted and grateful. I've always loved illustrations in books. My favourite job was when I worked at a publisher that did amazing illustrated books, even when it wasn't very fashionable. The illustrations in the Folio Society's edition of Piranesi  make my heart sing. This interview was done in a series of communications back and forth and we want to thank the entire team at Folio Society, Julian De Narvaez and Susanna Clarke for their contributions to this preview. If you want to keep up with the latest from Folio then you can check them out on their website  to see some of their past and current productions. You can also follow them on Facebook  or Instagram  to stay up with all the incredible seasonal releases and limited editions. If you want to see some of Julian's past work and keep up with what he is currently working on, check him out on Instagram . Interview by: Zach Harney a co-founder of the Collectible Book Vault *Since there are often different spellings in American English and British English of the same words, we have chosen to adhere to the spelling of the person who is speaking rather than conform to one convention for the whole interview.

Author of The Faithful and The Fallen and Bloodsworn Saga With his last trilogy, the Bloodsworn Saga, John Gwynne has shown he is a force to be reckoned with and one of the most exciting authors in the fantasy genre today. His first release, Malice, won the David Gemmel award and with each book his readership has grown. His vivid battle scenes, memorable characters, and classic themes have found an ever growing swath of devoted fans. He just also happens to be one of the most kind and generous authors that I have the pleasure to know, assuming you don't meet him on the battlefield! We are so excited to be able to bring you this conversation and hope you enjoy John's thoughtful answers and his love for all things fantasy. Q: If there even is such thing as a traditional path to becoming an author, it seems like yours would be more indirect than most! You have spent time as a musician, in hospitality, refurbishing furniture, and in academia. Is there a thread through all of this that led you to eventually write your first book, and who/what were some of the biggest influences that pushed you to finally start writing? Author John Gwynne and Courage You’re not wrong, I did take a serpentine route to being published. The only thread running through my life that eventually helped lead me to writing was my deep passion for reading. And specifically for reading fantasy and historical fiction. To be honest, there was never any plan to write. Certainly never any thought of being published. It didn’t enter my mind that I had the ability to write a novel, and it only came about through timing, circumstances, and the suggestion of my wife. We are going back here to around 2001/2002. My daughter Harriett was profoundly disabled and lived at home with us – me, my wife Caroline, and our three sons, James, Ed and Will. I was teaching at university, and Caroline ran a vintage furniture business which enabled her to work mostly from home so that she could care for Harriett. Harriett became increasingly unwell and so I took some time off from work to help out at home. Six months turned into a year, which turned into eighteen months, and I realized that I was needed permanently at home, so I stepped out of teaching to help look after Harriett full-time. I mucked in with Caroline’s business, although to be honest, I was not very practical back then. I chatted to Caroline about needing a hobby I could do from home, one that engaged the academic side of my brain, and Caroline suggested writing. I told her not to be ridiculous, I had no idea how to write a book, and was certain that I didn’t have the skills required. My sons James and Ed (Will had only just been born back then) chimed in enthusiastically, so I thought, okay, I’ll give it a go. It might be fun. I sat and brainstormed with them about the type of book I’d like to write, and out of that, the seeds of Malice , my first book, were sown. So, really right from the beginning, my greatest influences were my family. If you’re talking about literary influences, then I have to mention Tolkien. He was at the heart of my love for reading and fantasy. And Gemmell. I read his first novel, Legend,  when I was a teenager, and it was the first book I stayed up all night to finish. And, I must also mention Bernard Cornwell. He writes historical fiction, and his take on the Arthurian legend is one of my favourite series of all time. Q: You attracted attention pretty quickly with your first book Malice , winning the David Gemmel Award for best debut in 2012. What was your expectation with Malice  when it was first released? Did you have an inkling that it could turn into something bigger than a personal exercise in writing a story you were passionate about? The Faithful and the Fallen Series I went into publishing naively, not really having much of a clue as to how it worked or what to expect. It took eight years from starting on Malice to getting a publishing deal. The first year or two, I mostly just researched the series and came up with an overall story arc. Then I went back and started writing Malice . It must have taken me about four years to finish the first draft. At this point I still had no serious thoughts of being published, I wrote Malice  for my wife, children and possibly, a handful of friends who might be interested in reading it. Then, I did an edit, and around that point Caroline started encouraging me to try and get it published. I bought the Writer’s Handbook , discovered that I would need an agent if I wanted to get published traditionally, and so after a bit more research I submitted Malice to John Jarrold. He took me on as a client, did another editorial pass and then submitted it to the ‘Big 5’ in the UK. To my even greater amazement, I received an offer from Tor UK, an imprint of Pan Macmillan. It was a terrifying and euphorically exciting time. And as you mention, the following year Malice won the David Gemmell Morningstar Award for best debut fantasy novel. It was like a dream. Gemmell was one of my biggest inspirations, so to win that award, well, it was a dream-come-true moment. To be honest, ALL of this has been a series of dream come true moments. I regularly pinch myself to make sure that this writing for a living malarkey is not all one big dream. I consider myself extremely fortunate that Malice found its way to the right people. My agent, my editor at Tor UK, Julie Crisp. And of course, the amazing readers out there who have taken my made-up characters and worlds to their hearts. Q: From spending time with you and your family, it is clear that you are extremely close, and family is the most important thing in your life. What has it meant to you to be so supported by your family through this journey of becoming an author, and what roles have they each played in getting you where you are today? Thank you, Zach, it’s lovely of you to say that. You’re right, family is the most important part of my life. And they have all played a massive part in my life as a writer. As I’ve mentioned already, I wouldn’t even have attempted writing without my wife Caroline prodding me towards having a go. My children have been inspirational to me. They have inspired characters – Drem and Svik to name just a couple – and overall been just so incredibly supportive. The Gwynne Family Right from the beginning of my life as a writer, my wife and children have been inextricably involved. Every book event I’ve attended, my family have been there with me – sometimes some of them, sometimes all of them. Every book I write, I chat to them about what I’m doing, what I’m thinking, and they are always so helpful. My sons are my first readers. We all love talking books, talking book-art, talking writing. Books are part of our make-up. Even before I was a writer, stories played such a central role in our family life. Stories at bedtime for the children, reading together, sitting around the table telling each other tales. And Harriett has been such an inspiration. Her bravery in the face of hardship. Her courage, the love she always managed to share, lighting up a room with her smile. She was incredible. Big-hearted, mischievous, she gave far more to me than I could ever give back to her. And as you know, Harriett died in 2021. Over three years ago now, but it does not feel like that. It has been unimaginably painful for us all. Really beyond words to explain. We have all learned about grief the hard way. It is not a linear thing. You do not go through the stages of grief and come out the other end. There is no getting over it or moving on, not in my experience, anyway. What we have done is slowly, very slowly, learned to live again, despite the pain. Learned to see the good around us worth facing each day for. Family, each other. It’s a different world for us all, now. A world that is less, because Harriett isn’t in it with us.    Q. Many of your characters endure great losses and hardships. What’s your approach to writing grief and resilience in a way that feels authentic, and how do you decide when to give your characters moments of hope amidst the darkness? How have your own experiences shaped your writing in this area? I have always tried to write characters and emotions as authentically as I can. It is part of the human experience to feel grief, I think. I have certainly experienced it, though I wish that I hadn’t. I hope that my experience of grief helps me to write it in a way that feels true and honest. And I hope I have written it in a way that will encourage people to hang in there. To try and face each day, sometimes each moment. I have been honoured and blown away by the messages I have received over the last few years, messages sending love and heartfelt sympathies over the loss of my Harriett. But I have also heard from people who have lost loved ones of their own, children of their own. And I have heard from people telling me that my writing has helped them through dark times. This is truly humbling, and the greatest honour.  Q: There are strong Norse mythology influences in your most recent series The Bloodsworn Saga, as well as nods to the classic British Fantasy greats throughout your writing, at the same time, there is are aspects of your writing that feel firmly modern. What are some of your most important historical and literary influences, and what is your approach to integrating these into a modern fantasy series that somehow feels both nostalgic and relevant at the same time? The Bloodsworn Saga I grew up loving epic fantasy and historical epics, and I still love to read this type of fantasy. Lord of the Rings  was life-changing for me.  I read David Gemmell’s Legend as a teenager in the 1980s and loved his focus on flawed characters and pacing. Bernard Cornwell is also a huge inspiration to me, and also books like Manda Scott’s Boudicca  series. Novels like this will always be part of my inspiration. When I write, I always start with a historical period. I research that, and also the mythology of that culture. So, for example, with the Bloodsworn Saga  I focused on Viking Age Scandinavia, looking at the history and culture, and also at the mythology and source texts. Books like the Poetic Edda  and the Icelandic Sagas . This all goes into the worldbuilding pot, and helps me to set the tone and characters. I want to be immersed in that world and hopefully come out with a story that feels historically authentic. I’m really pleased you think my writing has a modern feel to it, Zach. To be honest, that part of my writing mostly just comes down to a gut feeling. I have a format for beginning the writing process – research, lots of research, and while I’m doing the research, I will be thinking about the worldbuilding, the story arc, the plot and characters, but once I start writing I don’t really have a science or format to it. I have a rough ‘essay plan’ of how the story goes, and then I begin writing. Each scene is really decided by my gut feeling as I’m writing it. All the character/story decisions are made in that way, so I’m pleased that you think my writing feels both nostalgic and modern, but I don’t really know how I do it.   Q: One of the things you are most famous for as an author is your ability to write extremely visceral and realistic battle scenes, placing the reader directly in the middle of the action. It is well known that you have spent time doing Viking battle reenactments and are a force to be reckoned with out on the South Downs. How has your personal experience recreating these battles influenced your writing, and how do you visualize the scenes as you are putting them to paper? I remember watching Braveheart at the cinema, in 1995 I think, and at the time it felt cutting edge. It breathed new life into a faded genre. It was epic and bold, and the battle scenes felt real and visceral. They stripped the glory out of battle and showed the horror and pain. Like a precursor to the opening scene of Saving Private Ryan. This always stayed with me and played quite an influence upon how I try to write battle scenes, whether they are one-on-one combat or large-scale battles. Endpapers from Of Blood and Bone - Broken Binding And yes, I do participate in Viking re-enactment. That is a LOT of fun. Dressing up in historical Viking-age kit – breeches, winnigas leg-wraps, linen undertunic, wool over tunic, and a coat of mail. Then the weapons – spear, sword, axe, and shield. I train with a local re-enactment group and they are extremely knowledgeable. We work on combat technique, starting with spear and shield work, then learning how to use an axe and sword, and how to fight in a shield wall. It’s all great fun, and even better, my sons do it with me. It’s an incredible feeling to be standing in the shield wall, facing your enemies with your sons at your side. Where Viking re-enactment has helped me to write combat is in the details. I’ve learned so many things that I wouldn’t have known or imagined without participating. Like how difficult it is to get into a coat of mail and how heavy it is. Little tricks to alleviate weight of the mail on your shoulders. How to use a shield as a weapon as well as a defensive tool. I hope that the re-enactment has helped me to add a layer of authenticity to the combat scenes I write. As for how I visualize a combat scene before or as I’m putting it together, well, usually I do exactly that. I see it in my head before I write it, as if it’s a film. I try and make sure the combat will feel authentic to the period, and also to the personality and skill-set of the character, and then I write it. Q: After the success of your first two series, which both take place in the same fictional universe, you pivoted to create an original world for your most recent trilogy, The Bloodsworn Saga . Was this an idea you had rolling around in your mind for some time, or did you have to create it from scratch? How you go about outlining such an epic and far-reaching story like that from the start? Is there a particular way you keep track of all the intricate plotlines to help you organize such expansive stories? Of Blood and Bone Trilogy - Broken Binding The Bloodsworn Saga  came about pretty organically. I’d finished my second series, Of Blood and Bone , which was set in the same world as The Faithful and the Fallen , and I was thinking about my next project. It just seemed like the obvious thing to do. When I think about a writing project, I go to the things I love. For the Faithful and the Fallen my inspiration was my love of Celtic history and mythology. For the Bloodsworn Saga  I went full Norse. I’ve always loved Norse mythology. I remember reading an adaptation of Beowulf when I was maybe nine or ten, and that was my door into Norse mythology. I loved the dynamic of the gods, how they weren’t perfect, how they were devious and self-serving. As I grew older, I read more Viking historical novels, like Frans G. Bergströms The Longships , Bernard Cornwell’s Last Kingdom , Robert Low’s Oathsworn  series and many others, and that led to me taking up Viking re-enactment. So, when it came time to think about my next project, I just knew it had to be something Norse-centered. I set about writing the Bloodsworn Saga  in much the same way as I did my other series. I always start with research, into the historical period and the mythology and folklore of the culture. I use this to inform my worldbuilding, and while I’m doing this, I’m working on the broad brushstrokes of a story. Once I have a loose outline and arc for the story, I start thinking about characters and about what kind of character would be most interesting to view the story through. One other thing I do just before I start writing is I pin a large blank sheet of paper to the wall, and I draw a timeline for each point of view, writing in the events I’ve worked out for that character, and seeing where the arcs will cross paths. Once I get to a certain point with all these factors I start writing, and then a lot of what I’ve plotted goes out the window. But that’s fine. Q: Within your stories, we often get the unique experience of seeing the perspective of characters that would traditionally not get viewpoints as they are antagonists within the story, even getting to see very important moments and sometimes their demise from their own perspective. What inspired you to give point-of-view chapters to these characters, and how do you approach making them more than one-dimensional villains? Malice - Grim Oak Press Right from Malice, I made the choice of including antagonist points of view in my writing, and it’s something that has stuck throughout all my series. I was mindful of staying away from two-dimensional bad guys and felt that the best way to do this was to see things from their perspective. I try to write my characters so that you can understand the logic and rationale behind the decisions they make, even if they are really bad decisions. In the books I read and films I watch, I always feel more immersed when the bad guy is written well and has an understandable rationale behind their decisions. Take Thanos in the Avengers movies. He’s clearly insane, but his logic does make sense in a twisted kind of way. The ultimate ‘greater good.’ So, that’s what I try to do. Q: Many of our readers are collectors and you have been approached by small press publishers to do limited editions of your books like The Broken Binding and Grim Oak Press. Can you tell us what your experience has been working with someone like Grim Oak, and what does it mean to you that people are so excited to get your books in these formats? Was this an area you were aware of before you were approached by Grim Oak? I think special and limited editions are amazing. As a teenager, I remember loving the special editions of The Lord of the Rings,  and also anything that featured artwork from fantasy books, so I’ve always loved seeing special editions and artistic interpretations of books. I remember being aware of Grim Oak Press years ago and I would daydream about seeing a Grim Oak version of The Faithful and the Fallen . And now it’s happening. Malice  is done and has been published, and right now the internal artwork for Valour  is being finalized. This whole publishing journey has been a sequence of dream-come-true moments, and I am constantly stunned and surprised by what has happened. It is such a thrill to work with passionate publishers and artists. I feel like a kid in a sweetshop when I receive emails from the artists involved, talking over what scenes to turn into illustrations, looking at the artist's drafts and talking about the details. It’s so much fun and really a wonderful experience. And to see the reception that special editions of my books have had, it’s been mind-blowing and incredibly humbling. It is a surreal feeling to see that readers are so excited to add these special editions to their collections. Marcus Whinney Cover Art for Valor - Grim Oak Press Q: You metioned your respect for the writing of British greats like Tolkien, David Gemmell and Bernard Cornwell, whose influence can clearly be seen in your writing. Are there any authors or series that have influenced you or moved you in a way that we might be surprised by? Also, what have you enjoyed reading most recently? You’re right, Gemmell and Tolkien have been huge influences in my writing. But really, there could be so many writers added to that list. I think everyone who I have read and loved has inspired me in some way. Influences come from so many places. I loved reading Dracula  for the first time around the age of twelve, I think, and Stephen King’s Salem’s Lot  soon after, and It not long after that, so I do have a nostalgic love of creepy horror. James Calvell’s Shogun . Manda Scott’s Boudicca series. I sometimes get asked if Craf – the talking crow in The Faithful and the Fallen  – was inspired by Poe’s the Raven . I wish I could say yes, because that would be cooler, but honestly, the reason I put a talking crow into the story is because I loved Arabel’s Raven by Joan Aitken. It’s a children’s book and I remember hearing it read first on BBC1’s Jackanory. Influences come from all directions, and not just books. Films are inspiring to me, too. I’ve mentioned Braveheart already, but there are so many more: The Last of the Mohicans, Spartacus, the Lord of the Rings movies, Conan the Barbarian, Ladyhawke, just too many to mention. After Harriett died, I stopped reading for a good long while, and even now my concentration isn’t what it was. But I have started reading again, and whilst I haven’t read many books over the last year, the ones I’ve read have been fantastic. Arthur , by Glies Kristian. The Outsider  by Stephen King. Empire of the Damned by Jay Kristoff, and The Daughter’s War  by Christopher Buehlman. All of them brilliant and five-star reads for me. Q: How do you hope your work will be remembered within the fantasy genre? Do you aim to leave a particular legacy or message behind through your stories? Of Blood and Bone Sprayed Edges - Broken Binding That’s a great question. First and foremost, I write to entertain. When I started writing Malice  as a hobby back in 2002, I was inspired by my love of fantasy, mythology and history, but my focus was trying to write a story that would move my readers emotionally (all four or five of them, back then). That’s what I used to love about reading. Being transported from my world into another place, where I felt what the characters were going through, where I cared deeply about what happened to them. That’s always the feeling I’m chasing when I write. But I think there’s more in your question, and if entertainment is the only factor to writing, then it can become a little forgettable over time. A little bit popcorn. I do try to include issues that are important to me. Family values are important to me, and they will always be featured in my writing. The importance of truth and courage, of love and kindness. My teaching background before I became a writer was sociology, so issues of equality are always high in my mind. Threads about race, class and gender will always appear in my books. I don’t see writing as a platform to preach my personal values from, as I said, I write first and foremost to entertain, and I hope that my books will be remembered as something that swept a reader up on an emotional journey, but if I can add a little bit more to the mix, perhaps leave people thinking about the importance of family and friendship, and of equality, then I don’t think that’s a bad thing, either. Q: There is a common refrain in your books “Truth and Courage,” and it seems to be somewhat of a mantra for you, even outside of your writing. What does this phrase mean to you, and how does it serve as a compass for your everyday life? Yes, it’s funny how things grow, and it's interesting to look back on my writing and see what has stuck and resonated with readers. When I wrote Malice, my intended and only audience was my wife and my children, and for my children, I wanted to try and leave them something that contained my personal values on life. I wanted a saying that summed it up. The original inspiration to do this came from the film Gladiator. Russel Crowe’s Strength and Honour.   But that didn’t quite sum up what I wanted. I think honesty is fundamental and so important. Honesty with yourself as well as others. It impacts so much, including our mental health, so I settled on truth . And I think courage is misunderstood. It’s not something that you either have or do not have. Courage is a choice, born out of fear. It’s about choosing to face and overcome your fear; not let it rule you. Courage shouldn’t be equated with ‘winning.’ It is more about facing something. Seeing it through. And, of course, none of us are perfect, we all fall short of even our own standards, and there’s no judgment for that. For me, it’s more about the trying. Trying to live a truthful and courageous life. So, that is where Truth and Courage came from. Q: Do you ever see yourself returning to the world of The Faithful and The Fallen  or Bloodsworn  in the future? What’s next for you in the publishing world, and are there any dream projects you have thought about but haven’t come to fruition yet? Map of The Banished Lands I would love to. I’d like to say definitely, but I don’t want to make that promise yet. Really, it just comes down to my time management. I sat down with my wife and boys the other day, and just chatted through book ideas I have been ruminating on, and afterwards Will told me he’d written it down and it was a twelve-book plan over six years. I’m laughing now just thinking about it. I’m not sure that’s realistic for me, but who knows? If I do stick to that plan, then we will definitely see something else taking place in the Banished Lands, and also something else with the Bloodsworn at its heart. But plans change, so I’m not making any promises. Right now, I am working on a new project. I’ve signed a contract with my excellent publishers, Orbit. The research is done. I’m just going over my notes and putting the story together, working on the characters and writing should begin imminently. It is working to my usual template. Taking a historical period and a world mythology as the starting point. I can’t say too much more about it, as I think my publishers will want to do some kind of announcement for it soon. All I can say is that I am really excited about it and can’t wait to get writing. This interview was done in a series of communications back and forth and I want to give a special thanks to John who was so gracious to participate in this interview. If you want to get more information on his books and latest news, you can also follow him on Instagram  or check out his website . There is also some really great merch related to his books that you can check out here . Interview by: Zach Harney, co-founder of the Collectible Book Vault

Tommy Arnold In this interview, we got to spend time picking the brain of Tommy Arnold, discussing his artistic journey, the influences that shape his work, and the process he brings to each illustration. His compositions bring richly detailed characters to life and his ability to capture movement and mood (always with a healthy dose of cool) is rarely matched. Tommy's art has been featured in the realms of fantasy and sci-fi limited edition and trade books and he has contributed concept art to AAA video game titles, Magic: The Gathering and has recently devoted his time to realizing the world of Murderbot that is coming to Apple TV in the near future. Even if you don't think you know his work, you probably have seen it, as he has been helping bring imaginative worlds to life in many different mediums throughout his career. I hope you enjoy this interview as we talk about his path to becoming an artist, some of his most iconic work, concept art vs. book illustration, working with Curious King on The Blade Itself and how he manages to create some of the most striking illustrations in speculative fiction. Q: You haven’t had the most conventional start to being a full-time artist, as it was really much later in life that you realized you were drawn to being an illustrator as a career. Were there any early formative experiences that point towards this and who were the major influences in your life in this area? I don't know that there is a traditional path really. I’ve talked to a few illustrators who knew that’s what they wanted to do from when they were really young. If you start that path with “I went to a college” then it's about the same as me. I went to a college that didn't have a great art program but they were accepting of their limitations and they didn't hold me back, which I think was the biggest thing for me. A lot of schools, if the teachers have their own limitations, then they get passed on to the students as taboos, and that wasn't the case for me. My teachers didn’t fully understand what I was trying to do, but they still encouraged me to do my own thing and loved what I was doing.   After that, I found a small trade school in Atlanta, which I don't even think exists anymore. It was called the Portfolio Center and it was mostly graphic design, but they had a small illustration program of around eight students and three teachers.   One of those teachers was Brian Stelfreeze, a comic book artist, and he gave me the bones, the foundation of everything that I could have gotten if I had been casually going at it for a much longer period of time, starting in high school or some much earlier period, and following through all the way into college and beyond. He told me that I could learn everything I needed through a high-powered injection of ideas over nine months and that is exactly what happened. I think I tried to quit multiple times during those nine months and he would always say, no, you're really close. It’s a very motivating position, to be told by a professional that you're really close. I really did get lucky that I just had this one guru that worked out for me, because it's hard for me to put my trust in somebody, but once I do, I'm going to listen to that person. So, he kept me on the path until the path was solid enough to keep me on it.   And after those nine months, I got a job working on an animated TV show and I dropped out of school, but Brian and I have stayed close to this day. In fact, just in October of 2023, he officiated my wedding, which was really cool for us.   Q: So, you end up leaving school and start pursuing freelance work out in the wider world. How did you go about looking for work and what opportunities came across your path?   A lot of the time this stuff just falls on you rather than you looking for it. I had started to read through a rather large blog called Muddy Colors. A working illustrator would do a post about the craft every day and I had stumbled across this at one point and then I was reading it daily with my coffee. I'm kind of a fanatic, so I went back and read about three articles a day. I started from the inception of the blog and I read up to the current article and then kept going when new ones released. Later, I even wrote for the site, and a lot of those collaborators for the blog did the kind of work that I wanted to do and ended up doing shortly thereafter.   The Witcher: The Last Wish Interior Illustration I had dreamed of being in the world of concept art for films, shows, and video games, but those jobs are incredibly demanding of your skillset in a way that I wasn't ready for yet, and it was hard to find solid education supporting that path. There weren't really many schools for concept art back then (I would have gone to one of them if there were), but there was one workshop in California called the Gnomon Workshop, which eventually turned into a full school. One of the recruiters looked at my portfolio and was like, “We can put you on the 3D track, and get you working within around two or three years, but this current stuff really isn’t great.” They were pretty down on it.   And this was around the same time I met Brian and he said, “I see exactly what you want to do and you can do it, but you don't have what you need yet.” It was such a different emotional resonance to that of the Gnomon recruiter so I decided to go with the person who believed in me. I always had this far-reaching goal of working on concepts and working in entertainment, but I needed to learn some things in the meantime and a place to practice my skills. I suppose the goal is you want to get to the point that you're getting paid to study art as fast as possible rather than paying to study art.   When trying to get my first job with an animation studio that did incredibly stylized shows, I remember they gave me an art test, not to find out if I could draw well enough to join the show, but to find out if I could draw badly enough to join the show. They said my portfolio was nice, but it was primarily landscapes, which was a lot of what I painted at the time, because they don't require a ton of difficult drawing. They actually wanted me to take some of their illustrations and imitate their style - which was way dialed back from the “realism” I’d been attempting and gave me 24 hours. I finished in a little over two hours and then I spent another 14 hours staring at it thinking, is this what they need?   And you know, then they gave me a job offer about five minutes after I turned it in.   Q: Early on you set your sights specifically on Tor and tried to get an interview with Irene Gallo, who was their Head of the Art Department and Vice President of Tordotcom. What drove you towards this and how did you end up making that connection?   It was simple, they were very visible at the time. At the time, Irene Gallo, the creative director at Tor who started up the tordotcom and publishing imprints, was very vocal in the community. I didn't really know what I was looking for but was lucky enough to connect with her and she was part of a group that was almost like a secret cabal. A cabal, which by chance was also very open in reality, and was filled with art directors and illustrators, and they ran this program called the Illustrated Illustration Masterclass. There was a lot of collaboration and they had podcasts where they were on each other's shows and they produced so much incredibly valuable content. They helped me understand what they (these Art Directors) were looking for, how to make it, who to show it to, and all sorts of valuable things in the industry. Lireal by Garth Nix Dust Jacket - Illumicrate Editions A lot of the jobs I do now I either knew I wasn't qualified for then or didn't know they existed yet, but I still went for it. I think all artists, when they're getting started, think that they'll be quite stylish or bring something new, but they don't realize that it's such an old game at this point. My early work is very stylish and lacks a lot of what I think makes it good now, but I’ve learned a ton over time and the style falls away as the skills get filled in. Honestly, now I’m working hard to bring a little pizazz - a little style - back into the work. It probably goes in cycles like that.   Anyways, Irene was hiring work that looked very cool to me and she was known amongst the illustrators I knew as someone who gave you a lot of freedom, but also a lot of responsibility. She didn’t micromanage, and basically gave us freedom, but if I wasn’t doing it right, I would know and then I’d have to do it again. That happened to me multiple times, but it was a great learning experience. They were very straightforward, difficult as it always is in the moment. You learn a lot when you work with Tor.   Q: The vast majority of your work is done digitally and is your favored medium. How did you find this as your chosen medium for creating your art? Is there a particular physical medium you are trying to approximate when doing digital art or do you think it is simply a form in and of itself?   Yeah, I did it backwards. I actually started digitally. I think more and more people in my generation of artists are like that now. I played Magic: The Gathering as a kid…a lot. I would compete in the Junior Super Series for 16 and under and then they changed it to 18 and under and I would play in the national championships of that almost every year. It was just what me and all my friends did. So, I was just slowly getting exposed to more and more fantasy art and not really considering how it was molding me as a person. I was just doing what I thought was fun. Golden Son by Pierce Brown Cover Art - Subterranean Press When I went to college, I just wanted to major in something fun. I didn't really know what to do. I took an art class because it was a liberal arts college and I kind of had to. I loved art, but in the back of my head, I knew you weren’t supposed to major in art. And I had this one friend, an older girl, (that I had a massive crush on) and she had a lot of sway with me and she just said why not? I said, “Well, you know you don't make any money.” She said, “Who says you can’t, maybe you could?” She was like, “Have you ever heard of Banksy?” He was just starting to be known at the time, particularly among college students. And so, I was like, “okay, well, I don't really know if Banksy makes any money, but it's a fair point.”   I started looking around at Magic card illustrators and there had been this one illustrator whose lands I'd always played in my decks and it was John Avon. I looked on his website and realized he'd been one of my favorite artists for years without my realizing it. I emailed him and he emailed me back and said he worked digitally and gave me instruction on it. He basically said, here is the technology, here are the specs your computer needs, good luck with it. I don't even think he looked at my site, but it was a very kind answer. I sometimes get emails like this from time to time now and I don't answer all of them, but if it's a good one I'll answer, because I do have a bit of a chip on my shoulder about it and because nobody gets where I’m at without quite a bit of help.   This was right before my 21st birthday and I remember my dad and I were supposed to go to Vegas to celebrate. It was supposed to be this big thing and we didn't have a ton of resources at the time. He had a work trip scheduled there and was going to pay for a two-connection flight for me to get there and join him. It was incredibly wonderful and generous, but I said to him, I don't need that for my future, but I do need this drawing tablet that this stranger that I adore has told me I need for my career. To my dad’s credit, he said ok, that sounds awesome, and if you feel that way about it we can get it for you instead of the Vegas thing. I was the only one in our school who had one of these. My classmates didn't even know you could paint digitally until I bought it in and I kept it under lock and key outside the computer lab.   It’s taken me awhile, but I've started to accept that I'm just a computer drawer. Even in the real world, I have to draw like I'm drawing on a computer because the marks are so different and it just kind of works for me, but I don't think it would necessarily work for everyone.   Queens of the Wyrd by Timandra Whitecastle Cover Art In terms of the digital medium, I've always been a big proponent of the idea that it's its own thing. It has a lot of powers that no other medium has and it has some restrictions and problems that no other medium has. I think it can let you appear to be good faster than any other medium and it can keep you from actually getting good for longer than any other medium because you have so much ability to fix your mistakes. If you're working in ink or watercolor and you mess up you have to start over. You really have to learn to be accurate fast, because you will mess up one little thing and boom, you’ve wasted like eight hours. You waste time drawing digitally in really different ways. You can think you're making it better for eight hours and really, it's unsalvageable and you would be better off just restarting. So, the emotional control takes a lot longer to learn.   I always sort of thought it was bizarre to try and emulate other mediums with digital because if that’s what you want to do then it's just faster to do it traditionally. All my favorite artists at the time were digital, and most of them were either Magic or book illustrators, or some of them were concept artists that I got exposed to later. But the thing is, traditional media and everything in the physical world does have a huge advantage. Sculptors get this advantage, in that the world is just lush with texture. There's texture everywhere, and for a lot of younger painters, it takes them a while to grasp that the density of information in the picture and the correctness of information, are the two things that really confer realism. You have to find ways in the computer to impart that gritty and realistic texture. If you can't, then the paintings always have this stylized feeling, because when we look around the world, we're just inundated with texture everywhere, and so we can't really escape it as artists.   In terms of other mediums, I also oil paint. That's kind of been an on-and-off hobby over the last ten years and I've worked to some degree with pretty much every other medium. But I need things that are very flexible. Again, because of that sort of digital affect that I have, I expect things to be highly editable. I don't mess with acrylic or watercolor, where you have to get it right the first time and you cannot change it, because that requires two different things I don't have. One is exactitude and the other is patience.   Q: There is a unique aspect of being primarily a digital artist and that is that you don’t have the fallback of selling originals. Of course, you can do signed limited prints and such, but for many artists that use oils or pen-and-ink, a major source of revenue is the sale of the originals, even more so than the actual commission for the pieces that will be included in a book or on a card. Does this make it less attractive for digital artists to do these kinds of projects and how does that factor into your mental calculus as you are looking at work?   Abhorsen by Garth Nix Illustration - Illumicrate I think that’s a fabulous question, because I think a lot of people are afraid to ask these kinds of questions of artists. If you let it be part of the calculus as a digital artist, you're usually making a bit of a mistake. And to highlight that, some artists are really adaptable and they don't care, they can work in any medium, especially when they've grown up as artists and did oil painting in college. You know, all the stuff that I never did and have had to learn later in an environment that was probably more effective but less guided. I’m thinking of someone like Victor Adame Minguez. Now, I don’t know anything about Victor’s background, but Victor is a fabulous artist who works a lot on Magic: The Gathering and other properties. As the player base and market for original art expanded and the game was bought by Hasbro, the collectability of the original oil paintings just went through the roof. I remember seeing the Arcbound Ravager original painting (and that set came out around 2012), and the original painting went for like $60,000 and a bunch of artists just said, “I'll just paint with oil, I don't care.” Victor did this as well and you had to really respect it, because at first the quality of the paintings went down a bit, but he obviously worked hard at it and pretty quickly the quality was as good or better than it had ever been, and that's so impressive. Now there are auctions where artists are selling paintings for $30,000 or $50,000 or some crazy number, especially if it's a good card, and so that calculus can be in there. Some of the most notorious sort of OG's of the field, someone like Donato Giancola can sell originals for so much money.   One of the things I love about when I'm oil painting is that it doesn't have any outside pressures or problem-solving pressure on it. I guess the best way to put it is I'm a purist at heart. I don't like crossing the channels. With fine art (I don't even call it that when I'm painting for myself), I like that anything could happen. It's a whole different thought process. I won't even commit the modern faux pas of comparing it to meditation, but it's just different and that's very enjoyable.   So, whenever I've thought, “I should take this commission because hmm it doesn't pay very well, but I bet I could sell prints of it,” it turns out to be self-sabotage because the whole time you know you're getting underpaid for the illustration and that you’re altering the work for the hope of selling prints of it or whatever, and also other things that do  pay a good rate are competing for your time. "Soren, Vengeful Bloodlord" from Magic: The Gathering In art, there is so much room at the top. People have been a little afraid about that because of AI, it seems like, but there's pretty much a whole world of artists that are pretty good, but that you could switch out with each other. And then there's the people that are always busy, and the people that are always busy: there's not enough of them to do all the work. That's why they're always busy. The supply and demand just don't add up, because what separates the pretty good from the really competent artists is a fair amount of effort and time you have to spend on your own, and it's a type of effort that's a little bit anathema to our modern culture. You don't get Instagram likes for sitting alone in a room drawing naked people off your computer, or a cube with different kinds of lights shining on it for months. You can't even make a video of you doing that look cool. So, you have to do a lot of internal work and work that nobody sees to get to that level. And that results in you being able to get a good rate for your time up front, rather than having to gamble that you can make some more off the long tail of an illustration job.   Q: As your career has grown and the breadth of your work expanded, how do you go about choosing your future projects? Are you having to be more selective with what you are taking on and are there ever specific works you actually seek out to illustrate?   I'm still a bit of a mercenary, honestly. My goal with art is always to push and expand what I'm capable of. My big core belief is in human ability and that it can be expanded and grown and that it can be cultivated. I think a lot of people can do much more than what they think they're capable of. I was really lucky to have people around me most of my life who believed in me and thought I could do whatever I wanted.   Everything in my life is pretty much geared towards :  how can I perform better as an artist, learn new skills, and execute on that. Generally, I’ll work for whoever is paying the most and is providing the most extra time and space for that to occur. It’s a balance of financial interest and genuine non-financial interest. Also, there is the cool factor, like Magic: The Gathering is doing these crossover sets now, with IPs like Final Fantasy or Doctor Who, but I don’t work for them much anymore because the rates and flexibility don’t often provide what I’m looking for. Also, since I'm not a traditional artist, I can't sell on the back end, which is a lot of how they justify keeping the rates low. More recently, they said they had a Marvel set coming up and would let me pick the characters I wanted, so I was in. I can't say who it is specifically, but there are certain Marvel characters that I’ve been watching since I was a kid in the 90s. I'm going to paint those characters and regardless of what I get paid, I'll justify it because it’s just going to be fun for me. Video Game Cover Art for Starfield DLC: Shattered Space Recently, I was doing a job negotiation with a company on doing the cover art for a big video game release, but they didn’t want to pay the same rate that we had used in the past. They were a little tight on money on this project and normally the contract is written to say that I can't show the work I do for them. This time though, I said if they wanted me to come down on the rate, they would need to allow me to show this publicly later, (which has a huge marketing value to me because it's a game that millions of people play), and be able to go, “Hey, I did this.” So, they agreed and we got it approved that way.   Q: You have been commissioned for projects of varying scale, from major releases with Orbit and Tor ( The Witcher , The Locked Tomb ) to very limited fine press projects. Do you find that these projects differ significantly as the size of the project increases or decreases or is your approach the same?   That field is very flexible, and it rewards good thinking, not rule-following, which is one of the things I love about it. I'm sure some of my art directors don't always love that, because I can play it pretty loose. Sometimes you can’t predict what jobs are going to be big though, like with Locked Tomb , I really didn't know it was going to be a thing, but I think Tor knew. There is a lot more at stake with the art for a book the publisher expects it to be big than when it's expected not to be. Sometimes you can tell they don’t care and you have a lot more freedom with that kind of job and just swing for the fences, maybe you hit a home run and maybe you miss.   Gideon the Ninth  was an interesting one though because I came in not knowing what to expect. I'd worked on a few projects with Tor at this point that they thought were going to be big. Some of them were and some of them weren't. Sometimes it came down to who the author was, other times it came down to placement and marketing. They always seemed to like my covers, but with the Locked Tomb, they wanted a portrait. It was supposed to be a portrait cover of Gideon in sunglasses. There are sketches for that out there somewhere. I had read the whole book because it's such a fun read. I had this image in my head from near the end of the book where there's this big fight going on and Gideon gets tossed her sword while she's walking through a storm of bones. The sword that's on the cover is not the sword that's in that scene, because in the book she gets tossed her two-hander, but I just thought it was cool as shit. I'd done that sketch and they liked it, but still asked me to do some more versions of the portrait, so I did. After a couple more rounds of portraits, they said that much to their chagrin, they felt the portraits weren’t standing up to the walking shot and so could I just paint that one. But, they said, “Make sure it stays this good and don't make us regret this.” The Locked Tomb Cover Art - Gideon the Ninth, Harrow the Ninth and Nona the Ninth   Q: I’ve heard you talk about the idea of something being “Cool” as being a legitimate end to art. Can you expand on that a little bit more and why that applies to the forms of art that you most frequently get hired for?   I don't know if that was an actual realization, that makes it sound more profound than it probably was for me. I think I've just always been someone who's excitable. When I saw The Matrix,  I didn't go buy a trench coat, but I watched The   Matrix  every day after school on repeat for four to five hours for probably two years. So, I've seen The   Matrix  hundreds and hundreds, maybe even a thousand times at this point. If I like something, I'll just return to it over and over again, and I still get that little hit of cool every time.   When you are working on a new piece, the important thing, and this goes back to the quality that I mentioned, is when you're making a piece of art, you have to be two people at once. You are an artist who's sitting there scribbling and you are a viewer who's standing over that artist's shoulder. When you get that feeling that something is great, stop. As the art director on your own shoulder, you just have to obey that feeling. You have to accept that something genuine was triggered in yourself and that's going to be something special. A lot of artists will have self-doubt around this. You can never know what anybody else is going to think and this bears out in every part of life. But the way to have solace is to do what you think is correct or right, and for me it was correct or right for it to be cool. Interior Illustration from The Book of Magic - Subterranean Press If I look at how those pieces that I think are cool are received, I can tell people kind of feel it. If I can’t get excited while creating it and think that it's dope, then no one else is going to think that either. We also have such a quick and obvious way to find that out now, which is, do people smash the like button?   With books especially, but I think with any source material, you are not really in any way in a position of authorship. I think it was Mondrian, the guy who's done all the blue, red and yellow squares with black lines. He said the position of the artist is simple. He is essentially a channel. And I love that idea. So, I’m not trying to supplant the author. The author wrote this awesome piece and there are people who love the work because of big reveals or their writing style and that’s great; that’s as it should be. I’m just trying to channel cool.   Q: Our readers will recognize your work from the projects you have done with small press publishers. How did you originally get connected with Anthony (Curious King) for The Blade Itself  and do you enjoy working on this kind of project?   Overall, it was great. There's a lot more to it to pull off these kinds of super high-end books than it might seem, and Anthony was clearly shooting for something very high-end. If somebody comes at you with a job and you have nothing but higher-paying jobs than that, you want to say no. But you're also in this position when you're a freelancer, so you don't always have to take the highest paying jobs.   I talk with my wife and my friends and other artists about this stuff all the time. A lot of them all are in the art world and so we are fortunate to have this group dialogue and there is a general consensus that illustrated books are a hard thing to make work financially. You typically do get more artistic freedom and they can help shift the look of your portfolio, which gives you a little more control. Generally, the more someone pays, the less creative freedom you have.   Anthony wasn’t the first one to reach out from the small press world, but he was one of the few who seemed really serious and was offering the money to back it up. Overall, the project was hard because the contract was so long and I was constantly being presented with shorter and higher paying contracts, so Anthony and I ran into that a couple of times where it was hard for me to regulate my schedule. He was incredibly patient with me, but I was also dealing with an injury during that time which really exacerbated this issue. My physical body has always been one of my biggest impediments. It took me so long to appreciate my physical body as a real instrument. It's not my pencils, it's not the computer. All that stuff is pretty crude compared to my body and my mind. I just wasn't supporting them the way that they needed. So, this project was during the end of me actually figuring that out and really getting where I needed to be physically, my mood, diet, all of it.   Endpaper Illustration from The Blade Itself by Joe Abercrombie - Curious King Anthony had high expectations, which I'm not afraid of, and I've been working as an artist who gets commissioned and receives feedback for long enough that if someone wants to collaborate at that level, then I’m in for it. He had a lot of opinions and ideas and he wasn't shy about expressing them. You know, we did more sketches for that book than I've ever done for any illustrated book. Maybe more than I've ever done for anything that wasn't like a AAA video game release. I will say he definitely got the better end of the deal. I didn't make my hourly on that job for sure, but I knew what I was getting into and we just decided to toss out the contract. I told him I could sign a contract if he wanted, but he said no and that he didn’t really need it. At that point we just decided, let’s make a great book.   So, we got Joe involved and we got to do group Zoom meetings and I would watch them respond to the pieces live. There were even one or two pieces that got done without a sketch. When it came to the cover, I presented two or three options and he said he didn’t want to go with any of them as they were. He picked one as a base and said he wanted me to go crazy with it. I was very happy about that because, honestly, you don't really know what a client's limits are until they tell you. And it turned out he had none. He was not weirded out by anything. He said, “that's a great Bloody Nine. But it would be even better if you blackened his eye and broke his nose and dislocated his zygomatic bone and make sure he’s got stubble.” I was just like “Okay, here we go!”   I was going crazy on that and I pulled up all this reference of MMA fighters with broken and shattered noses. If someone had walked in the room when I was working on this, they would have thought I'm a messed-up guy, but it paid off really nicely with that level of high collaboration. If the client is going for it, if you're swinging for the fences, you get home runs or you get misses, and we got mostly home runs in the book and that is a testament to two things, mostly Anthony's patience and his collaborative intensity. I'm someone that's always looking for a challenge and this was a challenging job. It was a decathlon sort of job.   Cover Art from The Blade Itself by Joe Abercrombie - Curious King Q: When you are asked to do an illustration for a particular work, especially when you aren’t familiar with that work, what is your preparation process? Do you feel like an artistic collaborator with the press that is hiring you or does it feel more like being hired for a job?   I read a lot, but I'm a mostly a nonfiction reader because I'm always reading things that are designed to figure out how can I get better at a particular skill set or solve a problem. Most of my fiction reading over the past decade has come from assignments. Early on it was more mixed, sometimes I would get a full book and sometimes it would just be a brief. A lot of art directors at the bigger houses want to give you a brief because they've already figured it out, they've gotten it approved by sales, and your job is to execute on that vision, and that can be really fun. In fact, there's something very pleasing about a linear process where they don't jerk you around and they know what they want. They know what they want and can express it, so you can give it to them and everybody knows whether you have failed or succeeded.   This again sounds so mercenary, but over time you realize if you get offered something and you’ve heard of it, it's probably good. If you get offered something and you've never heard of it, as someone that's got a foot in that world but doesn't read a ton of this kind of fiction, then you have to think about it a little more. I know some comic book readers who say that if you're going to be a real comic fan, you have to read all the crap as well as all the good stuff, “because I read all this crap when I was a kid and you have to go through that too.” That doesn’t make sense to me at all. I'll say I'm pretty selective, and with a self-published author these days I will evaluate it and if the book isn't good, I won't do it. If the book is good, I'll do it. It's as simple as that. It's not like I don't take self-published jobs. I've done tons of them. But the same thing is true with published work now, and if it's not good, it's hard to connect to. Sometimes you might not fully know till you've taken the job. The Murderbot Diaries Interior Illustration - Subterranean Press When I agreed to do the Murderbot books for Subterranean Press, I hadn’t read them, but they were famous, so I thought, “How bad could they actually be?” I loved them, absolutely loved them. Me and my wife have read them all multiple times. We read them as bedtime stories. I read them out loud to her, doing voices for Art and a bunch of different characters. But you don't always know that going in. Sometimes you get one and you realize that it’s basically just someone's D&D campaign and I’m sitting there thinking, “What am I supposed to do with this?” Sometimes there isn’t anything obvious for you to channel and at that point you just have to find a way. You find a glimmer of something that you can be a channel for. Maybe it’s a fight that actually wasn’t shown. They didn't even really talk about it, but it was implied and I run with that and find my own inspiration from another source and use that.   Q: If you could pick one piece of literature to illustrate that you think would fit well with your style, what would that be? Why?   Ender's Game . I've said that to every publisher I've worked with and none of them have yet taken me up on it. But I would do it for a very reasonable rate and I would go ballistic on it. I would need two years. Someone would have to give me decent pay in two years, but because the pay would just be a token of the effort, I would spend on it, no one could pay me enough for the effort I would spend on it, which is why I would need a long time, because that would be my hobby for like two years. I could do a two-book set in two years actually, because once I get into that headspace and I'm there, I’d love to do Speaker for the Dead as well. It’s a very hard book to capture because the whole book happens inside a little boy's head, but it's incredible. That's been my dream job since I read that book when I was 10 or 11. I think a lot of my beliefs about trying to become great at something came from that, trying to work hard on something, and the belief that you can do it even though it might seem intense or overbearing when the world is collapsing in. Even when you’ve used all your fucking energy, you can give it your all for one more day. You can come up with a creative solution. It's all in that book and it had a big impact on me. I had read the book in paperback tons of times as a kid. It was one of those things I would return to every year just to experience it again.   Q: We know you are working on a few projects for the publishers mentioned above, but is there anything else you can tell us about that is on the horizon? Are there any personal or commissioned projects you can talk about in their earlier stages?   Outside of the book publishing world, there have also been some video games I have worked on. I worked on a couple NDA projects I'm not allowed to talk about specifically, but I can say they were platform, exclusive AAA titles that were some of the bestselling of the last year and that I helped design the covers. I was very fortunate to get to work with very experienced professionals in a small capacity on helping execute these projects and that was really fun.   Network Effect Interior Illustration - Subterranean Press The lack of being able to talk about it is a bummer with the kind of stuff I do. Another project that I'm allowed to talk about now because the show has been announced, is that I'm doing the concept art and design for the Apple TV adaptation of Murderbot. I haven't actually posted about that much or talked about it, so I don't think anybody really knows that I'm working on it or have worked on it, but I can't wait to see it and see the finished product. When the Costume Designer sends me a final photo of the suit on the actor, I'll just lose my mind probably. I honestly don't know exactly what it will feel like, but I am excited for it. And also, I’m just so excited for Martha (Wells).   It's such a fabulous series and Martha was the one that recommended me to work on the show. I had a great time talking with her when I did the Subterranean Press editions and I guess she mentioned to the director that I was the guy that did covers he liked, so that was how I got offered the job. I know that Jamie Jones, who did the original trade covers, also got offered to work on it. He was too busy on another show, but it was cool that they tried to bring on the book illustrators for the show concept art. That is kind of special for me too, because Jaime is someone I’ve looked up to for years and finally got the nerve to email him a couple years ago and asked if he could do a portfolio review and give me some pointers and answer a few questions. When I got Murderbot he really helped me process it and guided me through it.   It's been a long arc to get to this point because the skill set needed for concept art is completely different than with books. With a book you might have a month or two to turn in some sketches, and then you get feedback and do a final. With a show, it is full speed on the very first day. Right off the bat, they had me paint the suit, and said “show it to us tomorrow and we will meet every day.” This is totally normal for concept artists and it might sound like I’m being a baby, but for me it was a bit of an adjustment period coming from publishing, especially being a pretty introverted guy. It was 9 am every morning for a one-on-one, and I had to show them everything I did, it was the ultimate accountability. If you don't paint, they will know, and if it's not cool or interesting, they will make you start over. I worked with them from the very earliest stages, when there were only one or two episodes written, all the way to when it was green lit and handed off to costumes.   Q: Will those of us who know the covers from Subterranean Press recognize the suit from your work on those or were there major modifications from your original concepts of it?   I'd love to show you all the sketches. I will be able to show some of them once the pictures are out and more has been released about the show. I will say that the place we started was similar to the Subterranean Press cover, all in white. At the time it was only Paul (Weitz) and not Chris (Weitz), the two brothers that are the writers and show runners, and he just wanted to know about me, which I thought was really cool. He asked about my process and art and then about seven minutes into the meeting he was like, “All right, we like the suit that you did, but it looks a little sportier and Tron-like than we were hoping, so let’s make some adjustments” and that was the end of the meeting.   The Murderbot Diaries Cover Art - Subterranean Press As I mentioned, I'm someone that does like to do a lot of free research and pre-reading and I had spent a lot of time with the source material on this one because of my work with Sub Press. I had read all the books multiple times because I had illustrated them already. I knew from the start what made Murderbot so cool and I knew what the suit needed to do. Not only that, but I knew what it needed to do six books down the road, so we could anticipate that from the start and how the functions of the suit would be revealed over time. I knew that there would be scenes where Murderbot was in the skin suit, which doesn't involve the outer armor. I knew that there would be the outer armor and all the different ways that the helmet would work and that Murderbot’s suit would need pockets for the weapons since Martha had written it all throughout the series.   When you are working on a static illustration my main concern is that it has to be cool or give a strong feeling, but the character doesn’t actually walk around in that armor. The principal design characteristic of working in film, and this doesn't even apply in games really, is that it has to work, it has to move, and I learned a lot about that on this job. Coming in, I had some ideas about what the restrictions and limitations would be. The Costume Designers I worked with were very giving of their time to show me where it could be improved and what wasn't going to work practically. So, they're building it right now, and it’s really exciting for me, because I got to draw it, come up with the basic idea, then I got to refine it.    At the time I got the job, I'd been doing the research to get into concept art for maybe two to three years at that point and was advertising myself as a concept artist and I guess they believed it. At that point, I had to be able to do it and luckily all that research and effort paid off and now I'm just like a kid in a candy store. This interview was done over Zoom between Zach and Tommy then transcribed into written form. We want to thank Tommy Arnold for his willingness to be a part of this series amidst his extremely busy schedule. If you want to check out a selection of Tommy's past projects, you can take a look at his portfolio on his website .  For updates on new and upcoming work from him, you can follow him on Instagram or on X . Interview by: Zach Harney of the Collectible Book Vault

Pat Randle of Nomad Letterpress In today’s interview, we have the pleasure of speaking with Pat Randle, a master of the traditional art of letterpress printing and friend to Collectible Book Vault. Pat has carried forward the time-honored techniques and tradition of his father's press (Whittington Press), while exploring new creative avenues in the craft. Nomad Letterpress, known for its unique, hand-printed editions, has captured the beauty of tactile design and remains a beacon for bibliophiles and printing enthusiasts. Pat’s deep commitment to preserving the heritage of letterpress, combined with his passion for the evolving print landscape, offers a fascinating insight into the world of modern fine press books and printing. Join us as we delve into his journey, his passion for letterpress printing, and the future of this timeless art form. Q: Your parents, John and Rosalind Randle, started Whittington Press in 1971 originally as a hobby as a change from their busy London publishing jobs, but it soon became so much more than that. What was your own experience seeing Whittington Press develop and how engaged were you with the craft as you were growing up?   Nomad Letterpress in Cheltenham I was born in 1982 by which time the Whittington Press was the full-time occupation of my parents. We lived a mile or so from the Press and spent much of our childhood there. My Dad erected a playpen at the side of the Heidelberg and he would feed us wooden reglet through the bars whilst the noise of the machine sent me and my bro, Frank, to sleep. They both worked in London publishing jobs, my Dad at Heinemann and my Mum at Ernest Benn, and began the Press part-time in 1972 when they published their first book, A Boy at the Hogarth Press . Following a review in the Sunday Times sales were good and enabled my folks to consider developing Whittington Press into a full-time venture rather than a part-time hobby. My early memories of the press mostly involve heavy machinery, as it was the time when my Dad was accumulating discarded equipment. I think I just about remember the Heidelberg being craned into position, a wondrous thing for a 4-year-old boy to watch, and the excitement of riding in the front seat of a rented Luton van that went round a roundabout (in the UK we use these as an alternative to traffic lights) fast enough to leave the top half of the Monotype machine it was carrying pierced through the side wall. I imagine the deposit wasn’t reclaimed.   Q: The Matrix series from Whittington Press was one of its crowning achievements, and many of the older editions are highly sought after. What was the original inspiration for the first Matrix edition, and why do you think it holds such an important place in the evolution of the modern fine press movement?   The Matrix series has recently come to a conclusion with Number 36 (though the Index is in the works), and there have been recent reviews in Parenthesis , The Book Club of California Quarterly  with the forthcoming issue of Private Library  devoted to it.   My Dad writes in Quarterly : The seeds of Matrix were sown by two items which needed to be published, but would not in themselves stand up as individual publications: the diary of a pressman at the Shakespeare Head Press from 1928, and Brocard Sewell’s recollections of working with the printer-engraver Edward Walters at about the same time. It occurred to me that if we were to put these two together with a few other items, the result may have a wide enough scope to interest people in investing in the result. Matrix was chosen as the title as the 72-point Caslon swash M would look good on the masthead. To keep costs down and keep it all under one roof we brought a Monotype caster and keyboard, some ingots of lead and a 12-point Caslon die-case (all for less than the local typesetter’s estimate for doing the whole job), and Matrix became the first hot-metal job to be cast at the press. It was subtitled A Review for Printers & Bibliophiles:  “Review” because it suggested echoes of reviews such as the infamous Little Review  which flourished in Chicago from 1914-26, and could claim Pound, Eliot, Joyce & Hemingway between their brilliant Dadaist covers; “Printers” because this was to be a review for printers, from printers, printed from type on a 1936 Double Crown Wharfedale; and “Bibliophiles” because it was also aimed at those interested in books and their content. As many have discovered, editing a small review is a rewarding experience. Everyone enjoys being associated with it: readers enjoy being entertained, and people like to see themselves in print. As long as the initial effort of getting the flywheel turning proves productive, and worthwhile continue to flow in, a momentum is generated that carries the whole circus forward year on year.   In many ways, what you are doing with this blog shares similarities with Matrix - a recording of events, people and works by those involved in the world of fine press publishing. Indeed, some of those, Gangolf Ulbricht and Phil Abel were both featured within its pages, with the advantage of it being published in book format that their text could be featured alongside alongside some examples of their work. One of the main attractions of Matrix  is that whilst reading about Gangolf’s paper-making activities, you can be leafing through various samples of his paper, bringing the whole experience into reality.   Q: Can you tell us about how you moved into a full-time letterpress printer role? Was there anyone outside of your parents that had a pivotal influence on this and what was your first project that you took lead on?   I am not sure if there was a pivotal moment, but I began to print Matrix  for my Dad at Issue 31. I had been working in London and by the time I left I was managing a homeless hostel in Soho having worked part-time for printers Phil Abel (at Hand and Eye Letterpress) and also Alan Kitching at his Typography Workshop. The printing of Matrix  was the only project during the year that my Dad and I worked on together, it usually took about 3 months on the Heidelberg and we worked well as a team. I organised the more physical side of imposition, make-ready and running the sheets through the press whilst my Dad would examine the 8pp’s as they came off the machine, eager to identify typos & issues with spacing. Outside of that, I worked under the banner of Nomad Letterpress. I began to publish some books and a magazine, Double Dagger , both of which ran alongside the “jobbing” side of printing - the taking on of commissioned work - which my Dad avoided like the plague. I learned a lot from Phil, who was patient with me whilst I was busily smashing lay pins into polymer plates, and I imagine, through osmosis, picked up his techniques for calmly dealing with Bridezilla’s wedding invite demands. As well as the art of dealing with customers, jobbing work forced me to confront jobs that I wouldn’t or couldn’t have thought up myself, on various paper stocks, requiring the operation of different machinery, accurate guillotining and working to unreasonable turn-around times. It gave, and still gives, the place a discipline and a sense of immediacy that can be lacking when working on book projects that can sometimes be 3-4 years in the making. It also provided me with a valuable regular income that just isn’t there from publishing one or two books a year and no definite end point in sight. At the other end of the spectrum is Alan, best known for his playful use of wood type, a collection that he rescued from a Somerset Barn in the early 1990’s (see Matrix 26). Alan’s work has inspired a generation of young designers to fall in love with letterpress printing, but those bold expressive posters and broadsides that fool many into thinking they’re easy to construct, are all underpinned by a strict typographic discipline that Alan learned having completed one of the last letterpress compositors apprenticeships in the 1950’s. Alan’s son Robert and myself are members of an exclusive club whose Dad’s thought it a good idea to give their sons the middle name of their favourite typeface: Caslon.   Q: Being a full-time letterpress printer is obviously a job that involves a level of artistic ability as it is a skill set that taps firmly into the arts. On the other hand, you are dealing with more than century-old equipment that needs to be finely maintained on a regular basis. Is there a part of the job that draws you in more than the other or do you find the balance between the two is what is appealing to you about it?   Whilst we tap into the arts, I would take issue with describing ourselves as artists. We are, first and foremost, printers and designers, and interpreting these roles through some sort of artistic lens will lead to problems. Our role is to render and then reproduce the work of the artist as best we can onto paper. I see our job first and foremost as problem solvers, both in helping the publisher/artist/designer to achieve their desired outcome and then again in the manipulation of this often cranky machinery to behave in the way that it’s supposed to. There is a place in the world for the printing by letterpress of uneven, hand-inked, distressed wood type, but it is not here. Treasure Island from Conversation Tree Press - Printed by Nomad Letterpress Part of our role is to maintain these machines, and it’s an admission of defeat if we ever need to get an engineer out to sort a problem. Ellen is currently undertaking her semi-official Monotype apprenticeship, under the guidance of Neil Winter, who has now turned 70 years old. Part of that apprenticeship is the ability to be able to strip that Monotype machine down and rebuild it. In theory, it’s like looking under the bonnet of an old car, and much of our Monotype room is filled with shelving full of spare parts for the eventuality that they may, one day, be called upon. Ellen is getting a unique crash course in this formidable technology, a few years later and Neil would have found a way to retire. And we try not to be too romantic about this old machinery: the Welliver system, a computer interface developed by Bill Welliver in the US, has now replaced the spool paper on one of our casters meaning that we can now cast directly from a word document, bypassing the time-consuming keyboard stage and cutting out the inevitable resulting human errors. Neil refuses to acknowledge this white box’s existence, but the rest of us have been converted. It’s easy to get romantic about all this old machinery; it’s heavy, noisy and smells great. But we are not steam train enthusiasts. The bigger picture is that these machines output a superior product to more modern means of reproducing the printed word.   Q: At Nomad, some of the projects are done using hot metal monotype and created on site, while others are printed by plates that are created before your part of the printing process. Letterpress printing can mean a lot of things, from individually handset type to the much more mechanized plate printing. What is your preference and what advantages and drawbacks do you think each type presents?   Printing from movable metal-type, as invented by Gutenberg, and from plastic-backed plates are two completely different methods of reproducing the printed word by letterpress. All of our Nomad Letterpress publications are printed from hot-metal type, and are usually accompanied by wood engravings, linocuts, woodcuts, or any artwork that has originated from the human hand. The ideal companion to the artwork that has been engraved is printing from metal type, that itself has begun life as an engraving — the punch-cutter having engraved the punch that’s been struck into the matrix which in turn has had the molten lead pumped into it to form the character or piece of type. We would love for all the projects we do to be printed from our own hot-metal type, but I can see why the plastic plates are attractive: the files are generated directly from an adobe file, as opposed to being keyed in by the human hand, meaning that the time-consuming proof-reading stage doesn’t need to be repeated after setting. We also do not have the capacity to be casting more than one book at a time, whereas we can have multiple books at the plate-makers at any given time. Another limitation of the Monotype process is the limitation of typefaces: we have to restrict ourselves to pre-1960’s faces when the technology determined that new typefaces would no longer be used for hot-metal setting. We are happy with the limitations imposed by our range of typefaces, but I realise that today it’s fairly easy to commission a custom typeface.   Q: In the last 10 years, there has been a huge boom in new presses using letterpress printing methods in their productions and you have seen a large part of that business. Has it surprised you how in demand this has become and the kind of titles you are seeing, come across your desk over the past few years? Pages from Presses 2 There are certainly a few new small presses to have emerged over the last few years that are prepared to lift production values to the highest possible standards. But I don’t believe this to be a new phenomenon. If you were to look back to the “Golden Era” of small/fine presses in Britain, the inter-war period, you’d see parallels to many of these newer presses of today. In fact, I would argue that the production standards of that period, and the originality of the books produced, are yet to be surpassed. Those publishers went to great lengths to both build their “house style” and ensure they were producing work of the highest standards, be it in the commissioning of in-house typefaces or the range of hand- & mould made papers that they used, and many published work by the leading authors of their day. Pages from Presses 2 (Whittington, 2022) by David Butcher provides a survey of the work of these private presses, complemented by original leaves from the books that they produced. The leaves in this book show to their best advantage the range of type designs used, the formats and typographic design of the pages, the quality of inking and impression, the initials and decorative devices employed, and the way in which wood engravings and other illustrations are combined with the texts of the books. I hope one day (eyes on you here Zach) someone will produce a survey of today's fine presses — the technology has moved unrecognisably over the last 100 years, but the one common denominator between the two eras is the fact we’re all agreed that reproducing the printed word by letterpress is yet to be surpassed. When we are all 6-ft-under, lying horizontal in a wooden box, the small edition publishers of today will sit within a canon that contains fine presses since the time of Kelmscott, and it’ll be up to tomorrow's bibliographers as to judge how they compare. Q: Of these presses creating modern small/fine press editions, you have worked with so many of them that our readers would know including Curious King, Conversation Tree Press, Suntup Editions, Nepenthe Press, and even larger outfits like The Folio Society and Fablelistik Editions. Their publications include horror, fantasy, science fiction, weird fiction, classics and contemporary. This obviously varies significantly from the typical type of productions that Whittington Press/Nomad has done throughout the years. How do you view this evolution of the industry and do you have any reservations about it or just excitement about the constantly changing and novel work?   Nepenthe Press Fall of the House of Usher Yes, we’re always grateful to have a full order book, and have enjoyed working with these new publishers, all of whom bring something new and fresh to the table. As an example, on press this month we have had Nepenthe Press’s The Fall of the House of Usher (now being bound by Roger Grech), in which the artwork, three linocuts, were engraved by the publisher himself. But you’re right, I’d describe our interests as centred around the publishing and printing of books, and we don’t tend to stray into the re-printing of pre-existing texts. As touched on earlier, the majority of our books are accompanied by artwork that has originated from the human hand, be it wood engravings, linocuts, pochoir … . By comparison, every book that we have ever printed for one of these presses you mention has been a re-print of an existing text, and many of the texts are accompanied by offset litho reproductions. There are obviously exceptions, I thought Chris Daunt's engravings for Suntup’s Yellow Wallpaper  were wonderful (not printed by us!). I’m not sure I’d describe what these presses are doing as an evolution, they are following a long-established tradition — as touched on previously, those publishers featured in both volumes of Pages from Presses worked with both classic texts, alongside the contemporary authors of their day. And on occasion even published new material (my favourite example being Hazlewood Books Sailing Ships and Barges of the Western Mediterranean and Adriatic Seas  [1926] with hand-coloured copper-engravings by Wadsworth). At the moment it’s hard to ignore that “blingy” bindings are in vogue. Whilst I can appreciate the craftsmanship, I feel sorry for the poor goat or cow who sacrificed his skin so that half a dozen shiny foil blocks can be smashed into the lovely leather. From a printing perspective, I believe that the collaboration between the capabilities of letterpress printing and digital technology are yet to be truly explored, and many of these new presses are run by those with plenty more years in the tank, so what the future holds is something to look forward to. If there’s one thing I’d like to see from these presses is the willingness to venture into publishing new material. I realise this is certainly more risky as a business model, but I’m of the opinion that’s where the excitement in publishing lieu — the release of completely new material into the world, with no way of being sure whether it will swim or sink without trace.   Q: Over your many years of printing at Nomad, you have created so many beautiful productions that have become representative of the care you put into your work. If you could name just a couple of projects that exemplified your body of work and what you hope to produce, what would those be?   Well, as with life, what’s current is most exciting, at the moment, we have Paul Kershaw’s engravings of Skye on press. Paul is one of the most innovative and original wood-engravers of his generation. For twenty years he lived on the Isle of Skye, walking and climbing throughout the seasons on the Cuillins, one of the most dramatic mountain ranges in the British Isles. His images of the mountains and the sea around them, many using the multi-block techniques he has pioneered, are a testament to his love and understanding of that challenging landscape. Moving by Hilary Paynter - Printed by Nomad Letterpress The majority of Paul’s blocks are being printed by Helen Hillman. Helen joined us three years ago and is now proving herself to be an excellent printer of wood engravings (having printed Hilary Paynter’s Moving  last year), which requires a different skill set to printing on a production machine (such as a Heidelberg). Paul is able to achieve misty greys and multiple perspectives from the same block, often by the use of complex make-ready systems and inking strategies that he himself has worked out. Paul is himself an accomplished printer and is a master of messing with the process in order to suit his own ends. This book has been on press for 6 months already, and I expect we will be working on it for another 6, that’s before we begin the binding, but I really think it will be one of the most exciting projects to have ever come from the press. We have worked with Paul before, he was featured in our 2020 Vision publication, and also The Collector’s Cut  which accompanied the A edition of this volume. 2020 Vision  was an important project for us, the blocks having been beautifully printed by the brilliant Anna Parker, as it featured engravings by 20 of the leading wood engravers of that moment who brought with them all the peculiarities that their various engraving styles entailed. We were exposed to the ink recipes of Richard Wagener, the complex make-ready techniques of Abigail Rorer, the difference between the much-loved boxwood block and the resingrave preferred by Pete Lawrence and the subtle 4-block-colour techniques of Neil Bousfield. These skills Anna has passed onto Helen and Ellen who now possess unique skills in the printing of wood engravings, and it helped us establish relationships with the leading wood engravers of their day, many of whom we have worked, or are planning to work with since.   Q: I asked this series question of Phil Abel of Hand and Eye Letterpress last year and I’m interested to get your perspective as well. Naturally, t he art of letterpress printing is not as common as it was a century ago. Do you often think about the preservation of the craft and is this something you actively pursue or simply hope that by putting out all the work you do it will inspire others to potentially follow a similar course? Do you think it matters if this art is sustained?   Well, I can see both sides of the argument; to be preserved, things need to be looked after, but shutting everything off behind a glass cabinet is a surefire way to sterilise. Heidelberg Press As I touched on earlier, the point about what we do is not simply one of preservation for history’s sake, or for the love of this old machinery. It is because we believe absolutely, and we prove with the work that we produce each day, that our way of printing, from Gutenberg’s technology, is yet to be surpassed by more modern techniques of printing. We run workshops and I do some teaching from time to time. I am also Dad to three kids under 10 years old and witness every day the problems that the screen induces on the mind  . . . the creative possibilities of working with ones hands are the antidote to “screen time,” and setting type by letterpress in a composing stick is a different way for those who concern themselves with letters and text to engage with their subject.   Q: Your role has evolved during the years at Nomad and now you have very qualified people doing much more of the day-to-day work than you used to. Having someone like the talented Ellen Bills apprenticing and some of the craftsmen you still have helping with the monotype puts you in a position to consider some of the bigger-picture ideas facing the future of Nomad. As you look forward, where do you see the current trajectory leading you in the next 10-20 years?   Has Ellen written this!? . . . Well yes, I feel very fortunate to have Ellen, Helen, Neil (& previously Anna) running the place, but my first love is printing and I like to be hands on with all the work that we do, I do not see myself as some kind of factory manager in future years. I think any more than half a dozen people working here and that’s what I would become, and I am sure the quality of the work would suffer as a result. Pat Randle and Ellen Bills The workshop, and the people associated with it, are a priority over the coming months, as we look to move premises. In my opinion, the creation of a team of people who all enjoy being a part of a workshop team and take pride in what they do is as big of an achievement as any of the work that’s produced here, and I am more and more convinced that if you get the first part correct the high standards of output will surely follow. My focus at the moment is to get the next book off the ground — it’s the life’s work of Gaylord Schanilec’s Midnight Paper Sales Press . Gaylord is renowned for his multi-block, colour wood engravings and the project will feature leaves from publications past as well as illustrations printed from the original blocks. It’s likely that myself and Ellen will be spending time with Gaylord in the coming months (/years) printing the blocks at his press in Wisconsin. He will have been printing for 50 years in 2029, which is the kind of timeline we enjoy inching towards. We are also hopeful of publishing Peter Allen’s pochoir book, Oiseaux de France , which we have been working on since 2018, later this year and have books with illustrations by Harry Brockway and Jo Sweeting ready to go on press after that. I do not have any long-term plans, our daily aims are simple: we strive to create and have a hand in some of the finest books that will be produced during the 21st Century — if a companion to Jerry Kelly’s A Century for the Century   was to be produced in 2099, we strive towards believing that some of our printing would be included.         Q: If there was one word or phrase that was used to describe Nomad Letterpress, what would you hope that would be?   Well, I like to think “rush-job Randle” is consigned to history. How about one from my 7-yr-old Lenny: Team-work makes the dream-work.   Q: Can you give us an outlook for 2025-2026 and what projects you have in collaboration with other presses as well as your own work?   Hyperion from Curious King - Printed by Nomad We always tend to have projects on with Anthony from CK and Tony from Conversation Tree. Both of these guys started working with us about 3 years ago when printing from polymer was a fairly infrequent thing for us to be doing, and it is amazing for us to see them doing so well, and growing in confidence and pushing boundaries with each project that they undertake. They have helped us out hugely along the way - always ready to supply jobs during quieter spells, and have become real friends of the press during this time. We have a hot-metal one for Paul Suntup about to go on press using one of our favourite typefaces Walbaum with hand-made paper from the Czech Losin mill and another for Nepenthe using the rare Haarlemmer hot-metal face (designed by van Krimpen, it only exists in 14-point) in combination with linocuts from Vladimir Zimakov. We hope to begin printing with Fablelistik soon, again with books on our favourite paper Losin, and have one for Books Illustrated nearly ready too. The aforementioned understandably tend to approach us with spreadsheets and timetables, the antidote to which is our own work. The Paul Kershaw and Peter Allen projects have been going on for years and we can thankfully afford to be relaxed about that, knowing that the priority in our own work will always be the final outcome of the book, as opposed to hitting some kind of self-imposed deadlines. This interview was done in a series of communications back and forth with Pat and a visit in person and we want to give our sincerest thanks for all his time and openness. If you want more information on his work and where to get his paper then check out their website or follow them on Instagram . Interview by: Zach Harney co-founder of the Collectible Book Vault