Patience is rewarded, at least sometimes.

I see from John Crowley‘s Livejournal that the 25th anniversay edition of Little, Big is a go.

I’ve been waiting to hear that for something like a year and a half. Originally the go-no-go decision was supposed to be made in March of this year, but the subscription period was extended, and then in July the limitation was reduced (and extra material added). It was looking dodgy there for a bit, but it looks like the project is definitely on now.

Which means I will be getting my sweet, sweet numbered copy sometime in “Spring” next year. And, since I actually paid for the book way back when, and have long since considered that money as spent and gone, it will be almost like a free fine edition appearing when it does come.

The trick now will be to simply not think about it in the interim. Fortunately, as I age I seem to be getting better at forgetting about things…

Some quotes and fun facts about Crowley and this book:

• Crusty old Harold Bloom, who hates everything… or at least thinks there are only five authors in America today worth of praise. really likes Little, Big. Indeed, he’s writing the “critical introduction” to the 25th anniversay edition. A press release on the edition quotes Bloom: “Little, Big seems to me as miraculous as Shakespeare or Lewis Carroll”
• James Hynes, from an article praising Crowley: “When ‘You’ll love this’ isn’t recommendation enough, I have proceeded to claim (as I’m claiming here) that Little, Big is an Important American Novel that bears comparison to such works as One Hundred Years of Solitude and Nabokov’s Ada.”
• Nick Gevers on Crowley: “John Crowley is a giant, not only of American fantastic literature but of American literature generally. His novels have a poetic complexity of style, a breadth of symbolic reference, a depth of characterization and an intricate mastery of narrative structure with few contemporary parallels; reading them can be daunting, but the rewards of doing so are enormous.”
• Despite that, the “concordance” page for Little, Big at Amazon (where the paperback is still in print, and in stock) says that for all that he is a “daunting” read, Crowley is very readable. Or at least Amazon’s computer says that 80% of the books out there are harder to read, and 85% use more complex words. Somehow I don’t think the algorithm used there gets the same results that, say, a Sterling professor of Humanities at Yale might get.
• That page also tells us that in the $10 paperback, you get 21,250 words per dollar. I’m sure that’s very important for someone to know. This also means that the $250 numbered edition only gets 850 words per dollar. Still seems like a good deal, if they are good words. (The lettered edition has an additional 350 words hand-written, and that costs another $650 dollars. Getting 850 for a dollar is clearly a steal! Heh.)
• For something completely different, you can read the text of Crowley’s speech “Practicing the Arts Of Peace“, which was given as a Branigin lecture at Indiana University in 2005. In addition to being a lovely lecture in its own right, it has commentary on Little, Big and how it fits into the “Arts of Peace” concept, as well as a couple of lovely swipes at the realities of bookselling (as opposed to writing). Here’s a quote on that latter topic:
  

  The original title of the book was Little, Big; or, The Fairies’ Parliament, which I thought was expressive of its nature, but the publisher who first issued it objected; this was to be a book for general readers. “If we put fairies on the cover,” she said, “this book’s going right down the toilet.” Whether she was right or not I’ll never know; the book did not do very well in its initial fairy-less appearance as a general fiction title. Later it was reissued, with fairies, and migrated to the back of the bookstore, where the kinds of books are kept for readers who read no other kind. It has lately returned to the general-reader shelves for people to find who rarely or never read that kind.