Pictures! Pictures! Pictures!

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It's a great day for the visually-oriented. The extremely fine Charles Vess sent in his sketch for the frontispiece of Hope-in-the-Mist and it is nothing like anything I'd visualized and yet, once seen, inevitable. Which is to say, it is an independent work of art. Everybody involved is very happy with it indeed.

I can't share it with you because I haven't permission. But I can let you see what the front and back covers of the book will look like.

An image of it can be found here:

http://twitpic.com/3eqlu

and in much larger size here:

http://twitpic.com/3eqlu/full

The color of the title on the front cover will be tweaked before the book goes to press, so it will stand out.

Doesn't that look like a nifty little book, though? I'm extremely happy for me.

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While Others are Fighting Pirates, I'm Still Writing Books

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And Relentlessly Flogging Hope-in-the-Mist: The Extraordinary Career and Mysterious Life of Hope Mirrlees Week continues! Page proofs of the book arrived in the mail yesterday while simultaneously a mock-up of the cover came via the magic of the Intertubes. I'll share the latter with you as soon as it's final.


Meanwhile, over on Neil Gaiman's blog . . .

I found the following nifty little video. Moby gave "Shot in the Back of the Head," an instrumental track from his new CD to David Lynch, who animated it. It's good to have friends in the arts.





You can find Neil's blog here or you can simply Google "Neil" and click on the first item to come up. (Yes! He's bigger than Neil Armstrong.) The blog is full of interesting stuff because the guy is involved in dozens of projects all the time.

Did I mention that he's writing an introduction for my book?

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Ian Fleming -- the Early Years

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Okay, here's the story I promised you yesterday.

Hope Mirrlees, you must understand, was born into aristocracy, and (skipping over a great deal of genealogical complication) her nephew, Prince Robin de la Lanne-Mirrlees, had a long association with Ian Fleming. On Her Majesty's Secret Service was dedicated to him, and a character in one of the Bond novels who held down the fictional title of Sable Basilisk Pursuivant was based partially on him. (Robin Mirrlees was Rouge Dragon Pursuivant of the College of Arms -- one of the greatest job titles ever! -- and as such attended Queen Elizabeth II's coronation.)

Long before any of this, however, Ian Fleming went up to Robin's mother, Countess Frances de La Lanne-Mirrlees, who was a noted beauty of the day (as, having seen a copy of Man Ray's photo of her I can attest), and told her was writing a novel.

"Oh, Ian," she said. "Don't write a novel -- you haven't the brains for it."

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A Little More on Hope Mirrlees

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Yesterday's post ran a little long, so I put off until today the explanation of exactly who Hope Mirrlees is. So here's the very opening of Hope-in-the-Mist: The Extraordinary Career and Mysterious Life of Hope Mirrlees:

Hope Mirrlees is easily the most mysterious of the great twentieth century fantasists.She wrote one important work of modern fantasy, Lud-in-the-Mist, and then abruptly fell into silence. Her single professionally published poem was only the fifth work put out by Leonard and Virginia Woolf’s Hogarth Press, and is considered by critics to be a significant and possibly even important modernist work. But, despite her long and enduring friendship with T. S. Eliot, she never followed it up. She was a fringe member of the twentieth century’s single most prestigious literary sorority, the Bloomsbury Group, and yet by 1970 she was almost completely forgotten. There are no biographies of her, few pictures, and personal information is dauntingly difficult to find. The mists of time have closed around her.

Still, traces remain. With patience, it is possible to gather together these widely-scattered references to Mirrlees, and so assemble a rough sketch of her life and achievements.

Let this slim book serve as a beginning.

And, anticipating your question . . .

Why is this book coming out in an edition of two hundred? Because, while New York publishers have big corporations, warehouses full of books, night watchmen, and the like, small press publishers are often one-man operations and very frequently run out of the publisher's home. So the small edition allows Henry Wessells (who's not even trying to make a living out of Temporary Culture) to get about his living room without having to clamber over cartons of unsold books.

I dropped by the headquarters of a growing small press once just before it became big enough to justify the purchase of a separate building for the books and office and it was not a pretty sight.

Oh, and what the heck . . .

I have a small anecdote about Ian Fleming that I uncovered in the course of my researches but which I didn't include in the book because it had nothing to do with Mirrlees herself. So I'll share it with you tomorrow.

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Announcing: HOPE-IN-THE-MIST

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It's official! Hope-in-the-Mist, the first book-length study ever of the great fantasist Hope Mirrlees will be published on July 10th at Readercon in Burlington, Massachussetts.

Bookman extraordinaire Henry Wessells will be publishing the book under his Temporary Culture imprint. At 96 pages, it'll be a slim but (knowing Henry) beautiful book. With an introduction by Neil Gaiman and a frontispiece by Charles Vess. Why those two in particular? Simply because Neil's Stardust was in part inspired by Mirrlee's great fantasy novel Lud-in-the-Mist, and because Vess did the illustration for the first published version.

Intelligent people can argue for hours about which version (illustrated, prose-only, or movie) is best. But as for me, I saw the Vess version first and imprinted on it like a little baby duck. So I, quite appropriately, am extremely happy.

Details and ordering info can be found here.


How it came about . . .

Everybody has a hobby. Mine is writing. After a long day of courting literary immortality, I like to relax by writing non-fiction. Several years ago, I noticed that the only thing anybody appeared to know about Hope Mirrlees was that Virginia Woolf had called her "“her own heroine — capricious, exacting, exquisite, very learned, and beautifully dressed." So I went to Woolf's Diaries and Letters and copied down everything that Woolf had written about her.

I followed those leads to other leads in a treasure-hunt that went on for years. I found myself in contact with academics, critics, and relatives of the author all over the world. With his permission, I published a long letter from Mirrlees's nephew Count (now Prince) Robin Ian Evelyn Milne Stuart de la Lanne-Mirrlees in the New York Review of Science Fiction. The late Julia Briggs as a courtesy sent me a draft of her article on Mirrlees for the Dictionary of National Biography -- and I sent her back corrections. I received a note from T. S. Eliot's widow Valerie, granting me permission to quote from one of her husband's unpublished letters.

It was a great intellectual adventure for me.

And now it's over. Since Julia Briggs died, I've been so far as I can determine the world's foremost authority on Hope Mirrlees. However, I put everything I know about her into the book and so whoever reads Hope-in-the-Mist and then discovers one more fact about the lady (what she said at that tea with Yeats, what Picasso thought of her, the title of her never-written fourth novel) will instantly inherit the distinction. With, I might add, my blessing.

So who was Hope Mirrlees and why should you care . . . ?

This post is getting a little long. So I'll tell you tomorrow.

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Rainbow Over the Painted Bride

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Last Friday, Marianne and I went out on the monthly art crawl and, as we were parking our car, saw a rare double rainbow, landing smack-dab on the Painted Bride Art Center.

The Painted Bride is a pretty rarefied organization, artwise. Not sure how they'd feel about this shot.

The man who covered the Center with mirrors and tiles, however, Philadelphia's own legendary artist Isaiah Zagar, would have to approve.

Oh, and stay tuned . . .

I've got an announcement to make. Probably Monday.

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Chip!

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I was quoted in a long article about Samuel R. Delany that ran in the Philadelphia Inquirer on Sunday.  And my friends have been calling me up ever since and asking to speak to Michael Swankier.  Anything that gives my pals a chance to razz me happily is a good thing.

You can read the article here.  I believe my name may have been corrected.

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